(Hi, Retool employee here who worked on this piece.)
This is the second installment[1] in what we hope will be a regular series telling the stories of novel programming environments that had a lot of influence on developers.
Creating these is a labor of love—we get to talk to the original teams who built products that were formational for us. We have an incredible in-house creative team that finds a way to sneak these fun mini-sites in amongst their other work.
For me, the most exciting part of working on a product like Retool is that it's an evolution of lot of ideas from the past. We're always looking at prior art to spark ideas and challenge our assumptions as we're building. There are many great ideas in old computing papers and products that were either before their time, or lost when there were major shifts in the industry. Pipes was a touchpoint for us as we built out one of our newer products[2].
We have lots of ideas for future installments in this series, but if you have any programming environments that were near and dear to you heart, let me know!
[1] Our first deep-dive was on Visual Basic. I'm very biased (I wrote it!), but if you like Glenn's Pipes piece, you'll probably enjoy this one too. :) https://retool.com/visual-basic
Hi Ryan, I appreciate the artistic approach taken, but thought you might want to know the page barely works for me in Firefox 120 on Linux 6.6. Everything is very laggy and the scrolljacking is terrible. Chromium is much smoother but the scrolljacking is still bad.
Generally speaking I don't think Linux is a target platform worth worrying too much about, but when it comes to programming-related content that might not be the case.
Generally speaking I don't think Linux is a target platform
Maybe, but you’d think an iOS iPad might be a target. I just closed the tab, as there’s no reader view, and the janky scrolling and waiting for text to load (text!) wasn’t worth the effort.
Same here on Firefox 120 Win10, but I don't mind it on the rare occasion such as this where it's half art project half write-up. If it were every article it would get tiresome.
Author here: Thank you so much for the amazing work! I am still finding more Easter eggs. Tips to other readers: click on EVERYTHING on the desktop in the opening splash screen.
This is the second installment[1] in what we hope will be a regular series telling the stories of novel programming environments that had a lot of influence on developers.
Creating these is a labor of love—we get to talk to the original teams who built products that were formational for us. We have an incredible in-house creative team that finds a way to sneak these fun mini-sites in amongst their other work.
For me, the most exciting part of working on a product like Retool is that it's an evolution of lot of ideas from the past. We're always looking at prior art to spark ideas and challenge our assumptions as we're building. There are many great ideas in old computing papers and products that were either before their time, or lost when there were major shifts in the industry. Pipes was a touchpoint for us as we built out one of our newer products[2].
We have lots of ideas for future installments in this series, but if you have any programming environments that were near and dear to you heart, let me know!
[1] Our first deep-dive was on Visual Basic. I'm very biased (I wrote it!), but if you like Glenn's Pipes piece, you'll probably enjoy this one too. :) https://retool.com/visual-basic
[2] Retool Workflows: https://retool.com/workflows