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I have long running ruby and java apps that I use for this purpose. They have build scripts, test frameworks, etc. When I get an idea for something new I add them to one of these existing projects, but I do it in a way that I can easily excise it in the future.

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Curious to hear more. Are these personal projects or serving users? What are some examples of unrelated ideas you’ve tacked on to existing app servers?

It’s mostly enterprise stuff. I have a local rails app and local springboot app that I keep around and am constantly trying stuff out in. If it starts to look like it would be generally useful I will rip it out, put it in it’s own repo, set it up in a jenkins pipeline, and then have the jar/gem published to an internal artifactory instance. Then I can just include the jar or gem in other codebases as needed. Works great and keeps me from doing a bunch of boilerplate for something which may go nowhere.

Oh I see. So you avoid the boilerplate of setting up a new project and configuring it how you like just to try stuff out. That's smart as that part usually takes people down rabbit holes that distract from the main goal.

Megalith!

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