kkoppenhaver

I've recently been a big fan of Claude Code for building lots of these kinds of tools, but then I always ran into the "what now" problem. Our IT team certainly wasn't going to just deploy my randomly-built tool and give it access to our systems, so there was a whole other process to go through to get the things I was building out to the team.

That's basically solved with Retool, because all the resources and data connections are already provisioned and can be centrally managed and governed. By the time I have an app built, it's already built on top of our existing permissioning structure and I can deploy it to the whole team.

With the tooling we launched today, I'll actually find myself starting in Claude Code, sketching out what we're going to be building and having CC go into my Retool account (via MCP) to find what data I actually have available, before deploying the whole thing onto Retool at the very end.

To me, that's still a flow that's going to work in 2027!

Full text - "Started just following tutorials and reading a lot, then I'd want to expand on things so I'd give it the code I had, told it what I needed to do and then asked it to explain the new code to me.

It does a great job of basically writing you a tutorial tailored to your exact needs.

Then over time it just becomes easier to spot things yourself and edit/fix things you didn't even know existed a week beforehand.

Structurally it's so much nicer to look at than PHP+HTML too which is nice coming from WP dev.

Plus I needed to pick a language to learn for building my own security tools, etc and Python is perfect for it.

Too many upsides for me to ever write it off as a fad.

Learning to ask the right questions takes it from a fun toy to a Sr dev that teaches you, and a Jr dev that does the tedious things for you.

I could never go back to the way it was before

Google searches and stack overflow walked so AI could run "

I generally agree with most of the commenters here, that you need a team of just a couple experienced people to start building your in-house platform. But when you're constrained with that small of a team, building something full-code can make it tough to find the momentum you need to get any one solution over the finish line.

If you already have a solid software development process or a team already in place, maybe going with full-code could work. On the other hand, we have a customer that replaced a custom-built React dashboard that was powering their whole business with an app entirely built in Retool, and let them work with the team they already had in place. Empowering the entire team is one the reasons Retool exists. They’ve been prototyping new features incredibly fast, even the non-technical folks on their team can contribute, and they haven’t had to worry about managing freelancers or attracting and hiring a team.

You've got a lot of choices ahead of you and a lot of good advice here in the comments. Feel free to reach out to keanan@retool.com if I can help sort through any of it!

Seems like that would be a good fit for Airplane's Schedules: https://www.airplane.dev/schedules.

It's pretty much as straightforward as deploying your Python script (and any dependencies with requirements.txt) and setting up your schedule for when you want it to run!

8 years experience as a developer, starting up building small WordPress sites for an agency in Chicago. Have since founded my own consultancy, which I'm taking a bit of a step back from. I've worked with every type of client from local grocery stores all the way up to high-traffic sites like RollingStone.com.

On the side, I've been doing plenty of technical writing and am looking at ways I can leverage my technical knowledge besides just writing code day-to-day as well. Plenty of experience communicating with all sorts of non-technical stakeholders and love taking technical concepts and boiling them down to the core pieces of information.

I also have plenty of experience working with legacy codebases and jumping in and making improvements over time, while still shipping new features and bug fixes. Debugging odd errors and working through technical debt are some of my favorite kinds of problems.

Location: Chicago, IL

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: WordPress, Laravel, PHP, HTML, CSS, Javascript, AWS, Ansible, Python and plenty more ...

Also: Technical Writer, Conference Speaker, Consultant

Résumé/CV: https://hirekeanan.com

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/keanankoppenhaver/

Email: k.koppenhaver@gmail.com

We’re a small but growing consultancy largely focused around making WordPress work for everyone from local Chicago businesses all the way up to clients like RollingStone.com and some of the biggest brands in the world.

We meet our clients where they are. Sometimes that means modernizing a legacy codebase or building a plugin that works with their current site. Sometimes we get to start from scratch and use the latest WordPress has to offer to build them a great front-end and editorial experience. Either way, we use our deep experience in WordPress to work in collaboration with our clients and ensure that they get the best site possible.

For the full job posting, check out: https://alphaparticle.com/blog/senior-wordpress-developer-fu...

Remote: Yes

Willing to relocate: No

Technologies: Engineering Management, DevRel, WordPress, PHP, Laravel, CI/CD, Javascript (React, Vanilla JS)

Résumé/CV: https://hirekeanan.com

Email: k.koppenhaver@gmail.com

Acquiring a couple businesses that could benefit from content marketing soon.

We're trying to help photographers get alerts when conditions are going to be just right for the photo they want to take, but in a much simpler way than most of the other apps out there.

I'm actually working on spinning up a service around this (specific to WordPress developers for now). Designed to help freelancers and other developers who are feeling stuck and just want some coaching/advice, specific help on projects or specific problems, or confidence having someone behind them as they take on bigger/more complicated projects.

We've been piloting it with a few people so far and have caught some things early that, if they were built, would have caused some headaches down the road that we were able to help avoid.

I don't know how well that scales or if it applies to other spaces, but I feel like there are people who specialize in different stacks that could offer a service like this as well.

2. I would say we average once a month or so.

3. Self-hosted WordPress. It's what we're familiar with and we can customize it easily if needed.

4. https://alphaparticle.com/blog/

Alpha Particle is a Chicago-based digital consultancy that helps clients plan and build their web-based projects.

Our clients include large publishers and small WordPress sites, established SaaS companies and new startups. Most of work is either built on WordPress or Laravel, though there is a fair amount of pure consulting.

We're looking to hire part-time contractors to assist with our growing portfolio of clients

Ideally you can build a site in WordPress, modifying PHP as necessary, and are comfortable with some ambiguity with design. You will have access to Alpha Particle development and design resources to help you where necessary and a Project Manager will be able to answer any functionality questions you may have.

Contact: hello@alphaparticle.com and mention HN.

I do most of my writing for other blogs or over on our company blog, but tried to make my personal site as minimal and performant as possible while still being useful.

[1]https://wordpress.org/plugins/classic-editor/

It seems that outside of the dev community and people actively involved in WordPress news, there's very little familiarity with the fact that Gutenberg is coming.

We've launched a productized service[1] that helps people take an audit of their site, get familiar with using Gutenberg and give them resources to make the transition.

We've mostly found that's it's been going smoothly, but there are plenty of cases where sites have different customizations that will need to be worked around or refactored.

The Gutenberg team is working hard on making sure legacy things are handled properly, but there's a lot out there and it definitely needs to be taken on a case by case basis.

[1]https://alphaparticle.com/gutenberg

The only thing I haven't accounted for here is if you're querying against some sort of database, which would incur additional hosting costs.