Engineering notes
What we built
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How we build
Use Case | How we built a Retool-native error monitor without breaking data residency
Why standard tools like Sentry fail in regulated Retool environments, and how to monitor errors natively.
How we build
Use Case | How an autonomous vehicle company replaced its safety review BI tool with a production Retool dashboard
How Stackdrop replaced a slow BI tool with a focused Retool safety dashboard for an autonomous vehicle operator.
How we build
Use Case | How an insurance underwriting team upgraded a Retool app that had outgrown itself, one program at a time
How Stackdrop scaled a live Retool underwriting app without downtime, moving from single-page architecture to program-specific workflows.
Use Case | How an Edtech Platform replaced manual fraud review with a daily risk-scoring system
How Stackdrop built a risk-scoring system that replaced manual fraud review for an Edtech platform.
How we build
How to run full-text search across multiple columns in PostgreSQL
Use PostgreSQL's tsvector to search across multiple columns and joined tables, replacing broken client-side pagination with fast, indexed full-text search.
How we build
Retool HTML Component Events: Why All Handlers Fire at Once
Why Retool fires all HTML component event handlers at once and the undocumented attribute that fixes it
How we build
PostgreSQL INT4RANGE: Enforce non-overlapping zones in SQL
How to assign postal code zones to agents without overlap, using PostgreSQL's native range type and GIST constraint.
How we build
Why Signed S3 URLs Fail in Retool's PDF Component
Retool's PDF component uses fetch() to load files. If your S3 bucket isn't configured for CORS, it fails quietly