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Show HN: I built a site to share code boilerplates (boilermate.site)
83 points by sansjack on May 3, 2024 | hide | past | favorite | 37 comments
While looking for some code boilerplates i realised there isn't really an easy / efficient place to browse. Boilermate.site was made for the community to share them and give a vote!



I was excited for what I thought this was but half of these seems to be just stacks. "Use SvelteKit and Supabase" is not a boilerplate and just linking to Svelte doesn't actually provide any useful information. One just links to the Bun runtime.

It's a good idea and it has promise but need to have a high bar for submissions in order to actually be useful.


Maybe try it out.

It might remove steps to get the boilerplate in front of customers quicker, and iterate quicker than doing things manually.

I like Postgres a lot for many reasons.

Tools like Hasura and Nocodb/supabase/teable have their place though. It can seem a waste of time to build some admin UIs in the beginning but having something like this allows other folks in the business to participate.


I'm not sure what you're suggesting I try out.

Linking me to the bun runtime or the Svelte documentation and saying "here's a boilerplate for you" is not helpful when you're looking for something that you can just run `pnpm i` and start writing business logic, which is what all boilerplates purport to be at the end of the day.


Yes I was hoping to see some actual repos of boilerplate code. Just listing what libraries/languages go into a stack seems to lack usefulness.

It's like if I was looking for some Redux boilerplate and I just get linked to Redux.


There's no boilerplate here. This is all advertisements for different frameworks. The only thing I could figure out how to click linked to a github page offering a paid framework for something.

Not to be a dick, but whatever your concept of "boilerplate" is does not match with mine. Boilerplate is not a "stack" or "framework", that's why they have different names. Boilerplate is ten miles of code to setup and initialize something, and which can be reused. Frameworks include boilerplate, but are not themselves boilerplate.

The concept of sharing boilerplate would ideally be a list of gists, maybe a git repo. It's just text.

Also the UI on this site is very much not great. You click the box for the entry you want and it just gets a highlight. You have to hunt for the links within the box, which are all in de-emphasized gray font. This is basically the exact opposite of how you bring a link to the user's attention. You've intentionally hidden the links from the user.

My read is that this is a project from a young hacker who doesn't quite understand what it is they're building or why it's needed.


Hey Im Jack! Im the creator of boilermate.site I just wanted to add some context to the creation of this app! I have always loved the use of boilerplates when it comes to programming, it saves all that headache of the setup and gets you right into action, but there wasn't really a nice place to find boilerplates that are cool and trending! boilermate.site was created with Sveltekit and mongoDB using mongoose. This was the first time using mongoose and i wasn't too keen on it. I wrote all of the auth and logic myself for this and i will be honest the code is bloody awful.. as i really underestimated the amount of work needed to get this up... (guest authentication...). I think i will stick to using lucia-auth and postgres... Any questions or something which is god awful let me know! Thanks, Jack Sansom


Nice site. I think this will come in handy. Here's some notes.

  - title length limit seems too short
  - 5 tags seems too limiting--when looking for a specific combination of tags better to list everything
  - clicking on a tag takes you directly to the link unexpectedly (even if it's the only one)
  - being able to search for multiple (AND) tags is the killer feature


love the idea. reminds me of gitignore.io. Two remarks. I'd choose a different emoji for downvotes and second, how do I add a logo when entering a new tag/tech?


hey thanks for the feedback, currently you cant its just if its in the dev icon list im checking! But you can add a custom tag by just typing it!


I hope your webserver has several terabytes free for when someone submits a Vulkan example.


You don't upload the source to their site, you just link it


Am I misunderstanding? I cannot find a link to an actual repo, the #1 top sample just goes to Sveltekit?

I guess if your boilerplate is just building everything yourself... It shows postgres + supabase for it and those are all things you would have to manually bolt on to Sveltekit.


This may be intended to list boilerplates, but without any content filtering or moderation, it is only a matter of time to just be an open list of spam links. Or, it would be if any of the links worked.

Even if you did resolve the spam problem, allowing anonymous up/down voting is just going to make the "top" boilerplates be about who can click the most, not about quality or fitting different criteria to different use cases.

This is the start of an idea, to be sure... I just don't think it is ready yet.


I believe the visual noise can be reduced a bit. Here are a few personal ideas;

- Replace the loud icons with just an UP/DOWN arrow for voting.

- Pill Labels/Tags can have a subdued contrast — “24 minutes ago”, “GitHub”, etc. They can be just hyperlinks.

- Instead bring out the contrast in the taglines. I want to read that along with the title.

- The logos of various technology might be enough without their titles, such as “Python”, “NextJs”.

- Please make me scroll the page and not a frame inside a page.


I'm curious what's the argument for the last point.

I also tend to make apps that have nested containers scroll with the content. Anything wrong with it in particular?


It wastes vertical space, most people have horizontal monitors. On mobile devices it takes up a lot of the screen despite them being vertical.

It sometimes breaks thing like "space" to scroll, depends where focus ends up.


I use it mostly for web interactive apps, I guess mobile is not really my use case then.

I'll be more attentive to space scroll tho.

Thanks for the comment.


Even on the Desktop Web Browser (where I was), by default the scrollbars are hidden (macOS). It is not apparent that the content is scrollable but confined in a frame/container. I had to stumble on it when I graze over the Magic Mouse because the cursor is outside of the content (inside the frame/container).

Contents inside a frame is OK but make it apparent, say, have a thin border, with a lightly different backgound and have the scrollbar forced if the content is larger than the defined height of the frame.


The scroll is not properly restored between browser navigations.


it's a major accessibility hinderance as well


thanks for the feedback, i'm trying to better my frontend skill so i really appreciate this!


You might want to put the brakes on. I just visited the site and saw some very offensive content.


The B.O.O.B.S stack was my fave. The Author links to a Twitter thot and the GitHub links to the Bun (javascript) repo! Clever. Yes, I am 12 - have been for thirty years.


Is C code now classed as offensive?


Classless


No but the one about George Floyd was pretty taste less


I thought I could share code examples or cli commands to generate these scaffolds.

Also the website overflows on mobile.


There’s ship fast and MVP, and then there’s putting a website out that doesn’t really achieve what users expect. I’m not sure what to do here and it feels v indie-hacky


I see people have already worked out the rude word stacks.


I find this notable, only that Linus Torvalds appears to have trolled you, or somebody reffing directly to Linus.


Was going by new and found the n-word stack...


boilermate site stack itself is not right. It says gitlab, but links to GitHub and there is nothing there except a readme.


ah yeah sorry i haven't actually posted it publicly yet!


This is not code boilerplates at all. Nothing is clickable. This is a site that lists stacks.


Seeing SSL errors trying to load the site.


yeah im not sure what vercel is doing. Try this url https://boilermate.vercel.app ?


Congrats on shipping!




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