[ElFitz]

The last time I used Retool, I ended up wanting to kill myself. But that's mostly because we rely on Firebase and have many collections, with documents referencing other documents,... So loading times ended up taking for ever, and it seemed like the simplest thing to do was to query everything and handle the references 'locally', leading to astronomical RAM usage :/

After a week a scrapped it all and went back to developing the back office's front in React.

Although, in hindsight, maybe I was "holding it wrong". Unless my situation wasn't appropriate for the tool. Or maybe my way of using Firestore collections is just plain wrong. Who knows? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[dvdhsu]

Hi, I'm David, and I work @ Retool. I'm really sorry that our Firebase support is bad — we built it specifically for one customer and haven't iterated on it since. You're right that Retool doesn't handle deeply nested JSON well. (We designed Retool mostly for databases, so it handles tabular data pretty well.) This is something we will be working on next sprint!

Do you mind if I reach out to you? (Edit: found your email via your blog; just sent you an email.) I know that you've already built everything in React so I'm not here to sell you / convince you to switch back to Retool; I'm here to see how we can improve our Firebase integration / our handling of nested JSON so the next ElFitz doesn't have this issue again. Thanks!

[ElFitz]

Hi David!

Got your email, and replied. I'd be glad to help. Also, although I have ended up building our back office in React, I'd be glad to ditch it, have one less thing to maintain, and let my "internal customers" build their own tools.

Have a great week-end!

[Dansvidania]

Hey David, love to see you guys on hacker news! Come visit us in Czech Republic again soon :D