Serious about the idea and digging rabbit holes
by alchemistA couple of years later, I was in a much different situation. I'd long since let my startup slip into zombie mode and I'd built up a lifestyle business around Elixir screencasts that was finally pretty much covering my living expenses.
I had thousands of followers on YouTube and on my email list. Many in that audience were working on projects of their own and could use the same sort of starter kit that I could have a couple of years before. I was in a great position to write that starter kit, so I told my subscribers I planned to.
Not only that, but it was one of the things I'd identified as an opportunity while doing 30x500, and it was one of only two ideas to survive the "idea grinder" portion of the Nugget.one course.
Fractal rabbit holes
I saw the power in Rails templates and was very interested in setting up something similar for Elixir. I also drew inspiration from how Vue CLI and similar tools in the JavaScript ecosystem allow for users to interactively make a few decisions about what kind of app they want to generate from the command line.
I didn't want to add another layer of complexity for users by adding requirement that they already had another language installed and I didn't want to risk version or toolchain conflicts, so I decided the best option would be to write a native CLI in Rust to generate the desired Elixir code based on settings in a config file. I.e., they could choose to generate an app with the following options:
- full-stack app or a pure back-end API
- email-based auth or social media login
- SASS or PostCSS
- LiveView or a JS library
- dockerized or not
- etc...
And the result was, the project had become way more work than I had time for.
