My free Next.js / Tailwind / Firebase starter kit is now ready for you to try!
The starter kit landing page is here: https://www.firestarterapp.com/
This is a kit for developers, familiar with Node.js to quickly create and iterate on their app ideas. By choosing Next.js, React, Tailwind and Firebase, I believe this gives the best combo of tools to work fast and ship!
I would be really happy if some of you try it out. There are detailed steps on how to get started linked from that page.
So what problem am I solving?
Well the pain point with coming up with ideas and shipping them is two-fold:
- The time it takes to code
Ruby on rails famously started the trend of putting joy and developer speed at the forefront. I believe in this! Even so, I think for MVPs, Ruby on rails (and all the various MVC copycats - Lavarel, Django, ASP.NET, Phoenix, Express) is more work than it should be. Much of which is in backend coding, databases, migrations and so on.
With the Next.js and Firebase set up I have created here, there is no back end coding at all really, other than security rules which are very simple to set up.
- Maintenance / Devops
Typically you will have to deal with servers, nginx, pm2, systemd or whatever, or maybe some abstraction over this. At best you might use Heroku, but you pay a high premium for that convenience, and there is still stuff to maintain.
The choice of Next.js and in particular hosting on Vercel, and Firebase means you have no servers to deal with, no list of steps to deploy your app.
Once you merge a PR in Github, it just goes live. And you get live previews for free!
It is much more simple, and so your idea can sit there costing you hardly anything, and not needing any of your time.
Please ask questions, give it a try, give feedback (even if you don't try it), and I am happy to help anyone one on one get this working too.
Until it doesn't! :)
The Law of Leaky Abstractions comes to mind. Basically, the message is that abstractions frequently leak, and when they do, if you don't understand what's happening under the hood, you're screwed. That seems relevant here. I think users would want to feel comfortable that they'd be ok if there is a leak. After all, they're people with a desire to focus on shipping their product.
This isn’t a no code tool though so compiler errors are going to be a thing.
There is almost no additional abstraction I am introducing. It is NextJS. That comes with it’s own abstractions.
NextJS takes away a tonne of
NodeJS / React / Bundling pain though so I like it. It is almost at “Elm language” level of niceness to use.
wish such a solution existed for non-dev who are not familiar with Node.js but wish to create and iterate their app idea.
GPT4 gave me the explicit steps to build my first app. I happen to choose iphone app as it is a mobile data capture. (xcode/swiftui). I am sure there are apps that would suit your platform that could be taken as a challenge by a non-developer using GPT4
The nice thing about this stack is you don't need to know a lot about Node.js to use it. You are mainly coding on the front end - but you do need to be comfortable with React and JS/TS. Or you can get AI tools to help you of course!
thx. lets see what GPt4 tells me then.