(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.
My favorite “project awareness” technique for work was through pipes and I’ve never had something as quick as way back then.
I had a yahoo pipe that combined and deduped about 10-15 jira projects and about 30-50 GitHub commit streams into a single rss feed that I read through google reader.
It was glorious because it let me know quickly who changed what and when and where. And it was rss so I didn’t have to search through email or look at multiple notification pages.
I miss Yahoo Pipes so much. And YQL. In 2009 I implemented an effectively cross-domain XHR (ajax) plugin on top of jQuery so I could grab random webpages on the client-side and query them via CSS selectors (converted to XPath). YQL would give me JSONP back so it all felt quite magical. Ah the old days...
There are SaaS offerings for Node-RED or you can install it yourself but there isn't a one-click-Node-RED experience but https://deadred.flowhub.org provides that by being a serverless, static frontend-only version.
Yes pipes could be used as a CORS proxy, I built a full Spotify like app client side with jquery at the time, searching/streaming mp3s at radioblogclub and VK.com and fetching metadata/similar recommendations from last.fm etc...
Ah man, the open web we were promised. I miss these days of mashing up multiple services and just the general free for all. Can't do anything without an API key these days.
Yes pipes could be used as a CORS proxy, I built a full Spotify like app client side with jquery at the time, searching/streaming mp3s at radioblogclub and VK.com and fetching metadata/similar recommendations from last.fm etc...
Already mentioned above before I saw this comment but I'll pile on. Firefox on Linux workstation is really bad. Chromium much better but the scrolljacking is still really bad
I've never seen the phone lag on any other website. Hell, my Pixel 1 or Nexus phones didn't have issues either. I've never seen lag like this on any website, period... I don't think it's a GPU thing. Probably there is some condition that makes it really laggy on some devices and not others. Hmm.
I'm on a 13900K with an RX 6600 and it is barely usable for me as well. Firefox tho... just tested in Chrome and it is better after the initial scroll but that first move is a killer.
Yeah, Firefox on my office desktop (10-core i9 with 16GB RAM. Crap GPU though) was unresponsive for a good 30 seconds before I was able to close the tab. Worried for a sec that I'd have to force close the browser.
Just signed up this seems like it will replace some docker containers I have running on a free tier of fly.io dumping into a supabase free tier. Very cool thank you for sharing!
The owner, tod sacerdoti, is using it to scrape top stories from lobste.rs and submit them to HN as a karma arbitrage pump. Search todsacerdoti on https://gerikson.com/hnlo/ to see what I’m talking about. Judging by the amount of HN karma he’s accumulated it seems to work very well.
Readers may enjoy Flowpipe [1], an open source cloud scripting engine we launched this week. It allows creation of pipelines in HCL to connect HTTP queries, run containers, execute lambda-compatible functions, query databases, etc all from your own machine / CLI. It can also be combined with Steampie[2], our open source project to query cloud resources (139+ plugins) with SQL. We're more DevOps focused, but Yahoo Pipes was part of the inspiration for our naming of these "pipes" :-)
Thanks for your kind words - so great to hear that :-). We're really excited about Flowpipe and think it makes "cloud scripting" really fun & easy through pipelines - please let us know how you go and what we can improve!
I used pipes back in college to randomize our roommate ordering in picking dorm rooms. I had it take the top headline on The NY Times website, hash it, and pull out numbers from 1-6 in a deterministic way. It was the best way I could think of to do it from afar over the summer, and convince everyone it was fair without needing to run code ourselves. It was useful and fun to use!
Pipes was awesome for sure. It fit so nicely into a golden web 2.0 era sort of period where there was still loose open interoperability thanks to prevalent RSS and similar tech. Effective at cobbling together simple things to make simply useful things.
What's with this epic design and work put into this deep dive tho? What an effort from Retool. Suppose maybe just wondering why they didn't do it earlier! Ha
Readit News
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
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.
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.
Is there an RSS or JSON feed for just this series? If not, how about a webpage that lists them all?
I had a yahoo pipe that combined and deduped about 10-15 jira projects and about 30-50 GitHub commit streams into a single rss feed that I read through google reader.
It was glorious because it let me know quickly who changed what and when and where. And it was rss so I didn’t have to search through email or look at multiple notification pages.
It's pitched as being for Iot but it's incredibly flexible that you can do anything with it.
[0]=https://nodered.org
Alternatively, check out the source code at https://github.com/gorenje/cdn.flowhub.org and run it locally or somewhere else.
There are SaaS offerings for Node-RED or you can install it yourself but there isn't a one-click-Node-RED experience but https://deadred.flowhub.org provides that by being a serverless, static frontend-only version.
It makes all Chrome windows unusable, when the tab with this page is displayed.
I couldn't get anything to work.
So much work to bounce your readers, pity!
I've never seen the phone lag on any other website. Hell, my Pixel 1 or Nexus phones didn't have issues either. I've never seen lag like this on any website, period... I don't think it's a GPU thing. Probably there is some condition that makes it really laggy on some devices and not others. Hmm.
(Chrome on Android, Pixel 7)
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Would definitely give it a try if you’re looking to automate Yahoo Pipes style.
I have no affiliation to them, just a happy user
(disclaimer: I'm founder)
No I don’t think so. You probably want n8n if you’re keen on self-hosting.
1 - https://github.com/turbot/flowpipe 2 - https://github.com/turbot/steampipe
I'll check out Flowpipe!
What's with this epic design and work put into this deep dive tho? What an effort from Retool. Suppose maybe just wondering why they didn't do it earlier! Ha