Why I Built Templates for Rails and Go (After 10 Years of Shipping Other People's Products)

I'll get an idea for a side project, get excited, and start coding. Then a few days in I hit the same point every time: the actual idea is done, prototyped, working. Now I'm staring down everything around it. Auth, deployment, SEO basics, some kind of analytics so I'm not flying blind. A landing page that doesn't look like a placeholder. None of it is the hard part, exactly, but all of it has to happen before a single real user ever sees the thing.

It's a strange spot to be stuck in, because I've spent the last decade as a software engineer, most of it deep in Ruby on Rails, with a lot of Go mixed in more recently. On paper this shouldn't be the hard part. But most of that time has been inside one large codebase, on one team, where auth was already solved, a platform team handled deployment, and someone else owned analytics. I just pushed code. So the skills I never had to build are exactly the ones I need the moment I try to ship something of my own.

None of that is really about skill. It's just that this isn't the muscle I use day to day, and every time I want to ship something of my own, I end up paying that relearning tax before I even get to the idea itself.

Too many ideas, not enough time

The other thing pushing me here was more personal. I've got a handful of SaaS ideas I'd genuinely like to explore, not just as hobby side projects but as things I'd want to actually test in front of real users. The problem is that "test an idea" and "build a SaaS product" are supposed to be two different amounts of effort, and in practice they're not. Setting up auth, billing, a database, deployment, a landing page: that's real time, and I don't have enough of it to pay that tax for every idea I want to poke at.

So the templates became a way to solve my own problem first. If I could build a foundation solid enough to trust, I could spend my limited side-project hours on the idea, not on re-plumbing the same infrastructure for the fifth time. A way to quickly prototype the other ideas I've got, without paying the setup tax every time.

What "solid" means to me

I'll be honest, I don't think these are the flashiest templates out there. But I built them to be genuinely solid: the kind of foundation I'd trust for my own SaaS ideas, with the features that actually matter for shipping something real, not just a demo. I didn't cut corners on the parts that are tedious but necessary just to make the launch date. It just turned out solid enough, and useful enough on its own, that it made sense to put it out there too.

The templates

If you're a strong engineer who's never quite gotten around to shipping your own idea this might save you some time.

If that sounds like you, I've put together two starter templates, one for Rails and one for Go, that handle the deployment, auth, and infrastructure setup for you. You can try the live demos free at rdooley.dev.

Curious how other people are approaching this. Are you building all of it yourselves, or just shipping a scrappier first version and backfilling the rest later?