[macklu]

Hi all, product engineer who worked on this. Workflows is something we’ve spent almost two years working on and we’re all excited to announce it has gone “GA” (generally available)!

There’s _a lot_ that goes into shipping a new product to GA within an existing company that I hope to write about later, but today I’m just excited that it’s finally out there for everyone to use.

We initially created Workflows because a lot of Retool customers wanted a way to build automations – like jobs to search Twitter for topics and dump relevant Tweets into a database. We prototyped and user-tested a bunch of different UIs, and landed on letting users drag and drop code blocks on a 2D canvas, while also making each code block a self-contained REPL.

We found that it struck a nice balance between the simplicity and speed of visual programming and the power to extend and customize everything (including the built-in logic blocks) with code.

There’s a lot more that we’ve built to make it more useful and powerful for engineers (time traveling debugging, split-screens, tree-views, auto-layouts, etc) that I’d be more than happy to answer questions about!