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Comment by IceDane | Hacker News Reader

Is this what HN has come to? Upvoting low effort posts with cookie cutter programming templates? This is the kind of garbage that constantly gets posted to all programming subreddits to everyone's dismay, and usually gets downvoted to oblivion, as it should.

Here's a protip: The intersection of (people who are capable of building a SaaS application) and (people who need or want cookie cutter programming templates) is the empty set.

Also.. SaaS with next? If you're building a SaaS application, you're probably building an API first and an application second. You probably don't want to entangle this API with your frontend, even though you can.

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I just wanted to share my side-project of the last weekend. I've made it for myself first. It is a very opinionated template, made with the tools i like to use currently (Typescript, Prisma, Next.JS) I'll be happy if it's useful to someone else. I'm sad you found that it's garbage :(

If it makes you feel better, he's dead wrong. Whenever I'm building a new software project I'm always thinking "God damn why do I have to start from scratch every time for the same things."

I do really wish there were a well-established open source framework for bootstrapping projects with authentication and payments, something that was vetted by a lot of people though.

My dream :)

I don’t think your project is garbage, but you also called it the “ultimate” template, which as you pointed out below was a bit of marketing on your part. It’s not surprising that someone in HN is going to call you out on the marketing fluff.

I like that you posted a useful template, but it is difficult to see why it's so much better than all the alternatives that it deserves the title "ultimate". Perhaps if it just said "Open-source template for bootstrapping a SaaS project" that would be better.

This is the ultimate template for ME :)

My son is the most special thing in the world for me, but if I post his picture on a parents' forum saying "The ultimate child", I suspect some would disagree.

It's a useful project, and I genuinely thank you for sharing it. That people are upvoting it and commenting positively on it gives me much more information than you saying it's "the ultimate".

haha i'm a dad too, and my son is by far the ultimate baby :) I'see you point. But the fact that the software is public on github makes it implicitly "Open Source". Also a bit of "marketing" doesn't hurt for sharing ideas/projects

On HN, I would say it does hurt. Too many people here remember Digg c. 2007, when everything was "the ultimate" so it chafes whenever we see it here, lest our precious community end up the same way.

My usual rule is:

> If you feel the need to tell me how good it is, I'll assume it's not very good

Didn't knew about the no-marketing rule on HN sorry for that

I thought it was great. Thank you for sharing and being part of the Next.js community.

The target market is much larger than your empty set dig suggests.

There are very talented developers, often deeply technical and highly skilled in areas separate from the idiosyncrasies of building SaaS web apps, who appreciate a functional jump start in an area outside of their core competency.

If your expertise extends to the areas covered by OP's SaaS template, consider offering suggestions rather than dismissing the (graciously shared) project's entire raison d'etre.

> Also.. SaaS with next? If you're building a SaaS application, you're probably building an API first and an application second. You probably don't want to entangle this API with your frontend, even though you can.

Oh no, someone tell rauchg and the rest of the Vercel team that they've not only built a terrible framework (next.js) but their using it to build Vercel is also bad because checks notes IceDane on HN said nobody does this.

My God, it's just a cool weekend programming project. Calm down and tone down the elitist attitude.

> You probably don't want to entangle this API with your frontend, even though you can.

How about you build a SaaS with whatever gets the job done? Could be a single PHP file as long as it ships.

> Here's a protip: The intersection of (people who are capable of building a SaaS application) and (people who need or want cookie cutter programming templates) is the empty set.

Why? Considering the mess that is JS development, it's nice to have projects like that to quickly evaluate some options.

That sounds like a very specific vision of SaaS, one mainly aimed at programmers. That's not the only kind of SaaS out there.

> The intersection of (people who are capable of building a SaaS application) and (people who need or want cookie cutter programming templates) is the empty set.

It really isn't.

> The intersection of (people who are capable of building a SaaS application) and (people who need or want cookie cutter programming templates) is the empty set.

It's nice to start from something that is not an empty canvas. That said, I think this one mixes way too many independent opinions to be useful.

Anyway, "I made a thing, what do you think" is a common kind of post here, and starting templates are something that attracts a lot of interest.

> Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I don't know man, I find it pretty useful.

Reading this gave me a similar "beginning-of-the-end" vibe. Just last night I complained to my SO for hours about how B2B sales are going to destroy our current notion of the individual developer. I shudder to imagine what "development" will look like in 10 years: you pay Github $0.25 for access to your online dev environment, then $0.05 for each debug build and $0.50 for each release build? It sounds insane to frame things like that, but both Apple and Google have made it clear that they intend to move app compilation off-device.

So yeah, I have a hard time seeing anything other than dystopia when I look at this. It's certainly not poorly made or developed in bad faith, but the optics and rhetoric around it really make me sick.

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