The best boilerplate app is the one you code yourself | Hacker News Reader

The best boilerplate app is the one you code yourself

mindthecode.com

56 pointsHyra18 comments

As someone who works for themself, balancing productivity with learning is on my mind a lot.

Yes, creating my own boilerplate is attractive from a learning experience. Except when it's not learning but figuring out how to configure Webpack. Or how to get HMR working. Then it just becomes a chore and I explore Github for the best boilerplate for my needs.

To me, a boilerplate and a library aren't significantly different. The former is just exposed a lot more.

Likewise self-employed, I find myself increasingly strict on making new knowledge 'pay rent'. It's heresy hereabouts to say "I don't want to learn that new thing" but if you spend a week learning a new framework or package to solve a problem when you could code up a custom solution in three days, you've wasted time. Learning is an investment and you only get returns if you benefit from the knowledge.

Sharpening your saw is great but if you just want some firewood you should use your trusty old blocksplitter.

if you spend a week learning a new framework or package to solve a problem when you could code up a custom solution in three days, you've wasted time.

However, if you code up a custom solution that ignores some important detail of some deeper area of knowledge like security or concurrency, then your "3-day" solution might literally wind up costing millions or hundreds of millions. (Exercise: Name some famous historical precedents from famous companies relevant today.) Of course, the downside for your garden variety consultant is probably only worse by a factor of 2 to 10, but the point remains.

This is why the mastery of knowledge and practical experience necessary to reliably do such a cost-benefit analysis is very valuable. The upside in making decisions like this is something like saving 4 days or a week of programmer time. The downside can be literally worth a 21st century fortune.

Libraries with invalid default parameters need the most boilerplate config. An empty config file should create a working default setup.

And that's how you end up with a bunch of MongoDB databases in production without authentication turned on!

When picking the defaults to use without config, be sure they're settings that you want people to use.

I find that people (me included) get lost when there's "new tech" in a boilerplate. Rather than using it we try to poke and prod to see how it works and why. Before you know it, it's hours later and you haven't done what you set out to do :)

I have to disagree. Writing your own boilerplate can be a great way to learn a new stack, but I think seasoned developers should use (and contribute to) projects that are maintained by the community.

Whenever I come back to a boilerplate project, they're usually using the most recent versions of libraries, or they have some great new features. Examples:

* Rails Composer, for Rails apps: https://github.com/RailsApps/rails-composer

* Ignite, for React Native: https://github.com/infinitered/ignite

I do have one hand-written script that I use for all of my static sites. It copies all the static files into a build directory, gzips HTML/CSS/JS, syncs everything to an S3 bucket, then makes an API request to Cloudflare to purge the cache. But I'm planning to move all my static sites to Netlify [1], so I won't need that script for much longer.

[1] https://www.netlify.com

Please don't put so many gifs near text, it is annoying and gives headache

And we can't read it at work without looking like you're looking at memes...

I find the occasional GIF acceptable if it adds something to the text or the presentation. In this particular article, I would get rid of the GIF at the top, but keep the one near the Subscribe box.

Ironically, I only added these header gifs to two recent posts i did as i read they increase readability (ux wise). Even though not convinced I did feel i should try.

Thanks for the feedback, i'll go back to content-only.

Fair point!

I'm in need of js boilerplate. Currently I have a hacked together $, slickgrid, jdorn/json-editor, $-ui, bs3 setup I minify with closure-compiler. All 1.8MB(cdn) with my code 50KB.

I'm running the above on a flask/swagger api. But I need a backbone or something similar.

I looked at reclinejs but their more focused around the data. So missing some slickgrid functionality I need.

I tried to componentize it with mithril... but mithril great; the way I want to use it wrong.

So back to drawing board thinking of componentize with $.onmount next. I just need some small kind of mvc, I'm looking at backbone. But I need a slickgrid dataview that understands collections nicely :/

gah!?! why do I do this to myself!

Learn React and then use next.js.

I used Flask App Builder. Spent a lot of time understanding it. But way better than building my own.

I keep thinking to myself that I should write a MEAN-stack boilerplate for myself, but it's finding the free time that stings me.

I created my boilerplate app by customizing other boilerplate.

I discovered this myself, creating boilers is underrated.

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