The problem

In 2020, I plan to launch several small and several not-so-small products. In order to do so, I had to think of a way to improve my development process.

Every time an idea pops in my mind, ideally I would like to build & launch it asap. However, when I start building something, I need to go through the same process of setting a new Rails application. I quickly realised that, to some degree, every website has the same basic skeleton.

For every app, I need to install gems, configure those gems, create basic models, authentication, webpacker, tailwind, stimulus, basic controllers, admin, etc...

This might take several hours - hours which could be spent on building the actual product.

The motivation

There is already an amazing Rails template that is very popular in the community - Jumpstart. I tried it several times, but it's missing a lot of stuff that I like to use - such as TailwindCSS.

Then, I bought Jumpstart Pro. It is a great template which I will use in the future when I want to build a big project. However, the main problem that I found with Jumpstart Pro is that it is doing too many things - and I might not need everything for a simpler application.

If I don't need a certain feature, then I would have to remove it to keep my app clean. This means that using a template becomes a bit counterproductive.

The solution - a template that is as simple as the free version of Jumpstart but it is customised to the way that I like to code. I hope that my way of working is similar to other Rails developers, so more people can take an advantage of Railsboost!

The solution

I took the skeleton of the free version of Jumpstart and I upgraded on top of it. I included stuff like Tailwind, Stimulus, ActionText and more.

In the README.md file, you can read a list of all the things that I included in the template.

Future development

Version 1 is just the starting point - I already have a lot of todo items for the next iteration of Railsboost.

My goal is not to add more and more things. If I do so, I run into the risk of creating the same problem that I found with Jumpstart Pro.

Instead, I will look for ways to make things more efficient, easier and faster to start a new applications - selecting the right gems, creating aesthetically pleasing template layouts and building up useful StimulusJS and Tailwind components.