Ask HN: Do You Use Boilerplates? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Do You Use Boilerplates?

11 pointsvirgil_disgr4ce5 comments

I've been doing preparation research for a new SaaS product, and as a solo founder/designer/developer, I'm always looking for ways to save time and effort.

There are, of course, thousands of different boilerplates for parts of stacks, and some for full stacks, but hardly any for a complete functioning SaaS, including billing pages and functionality (think invoice receipts), account & team management, email notifications, etc. etc.—all the stuff you probably don't need to build yourself. I'm having an especially hard time finding something like that for a serverless React application (database as a service & lambdas instead of a traditional backend).

Do you use boilerplates for new products? Have you ever paid for one?

I only use boilerplate I made myself, because if I don't understand the components, It's hard for me to customize and integrate them.

I use this one: https://mdbootstrap.com/freebies/angular/boilerplate/

It's an open-sourced Angular CRUD application starter with NgRx state management and Firebase backend.

This one is free

Yeah, but the one I put together. It saves time, reduces number of decision points when starting a new project. I can concentrate on the product itself instead of the libraries and architectures.

In between projects, I try to update libraries or switch to new ones. It really helps if you assemble the boilerplate yourself, cause you know the logic behind every decision.

Of course I looked for inspiration in other people's boilerplates, it took me two weeks for the initial research and experimentation.

As far as opportunities for new products, if you can find a useful abstraction to remove a boilerplate component without losing too much customisation... then you've won. Here's some boilerplate I have to write often:

- Login pages

- Simple app state management

- Crud forms, view, edit, list objects

I have scripts, snippets, CSS skeletons, checklists that I try to reuse between projects, but that's about it. I have tried to build one for myself, but it just doesn't worth the effort, unless you are launching a large number of projects.

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