As a developer, how many times have you been asked:

"How long would it take to make ?".

I can't count the amount of times I relearned the lesson that these types of projects always take longer than expected to fully launch.

This recently happened to me when a friend brought up the idea of a "Fantasy Football Draft Order Generator", any my response was naively:

"A few hours or so".

(You can checkout the final product here. While it's very simple, I can promise it was more than a few hours.)

I usually get started creating these projects using a tool like create-next-app.

I'll add Typescript, Tailwind, a component library, wire up my site's layout, fiddle with flex-box in the footer, Figure out how external scripts should be loaded in Next JS , etc etc etc.

Many of these individual tasks are fairly trivial on their own, but it's often a death by 1000 cuts, where your "1 hour project" quickly turns into a whole ordeal. Before you know it, this trivial project starts eating into your evenings/weekends (or maybe you never get around to properly launching the project).

Do "future you" a favour...and create your own "Indie Boilerplate".

I've created mine here:
https://github.com/jamespohalloran/indie-boilerplate

On my next hobby project I'll be able to get started with:

npx create-next-app@latest -e https://github.com/jamespohalloran/indie-boilerplate

I won't need to worry about dealing with:

• the site's layout (Let's face it, these usually aren't that unique)
• Configuring SEO meta fields
• Setting up Tailwind & my preferred component library (DaisyUI in my case)
• Adding my personal links to the footer
• Adding copyright info

I also even have my own "Indie Project Checklist" in the readme to keep me on track.

I hope this helps out "future you" on your next hobby project!

To follow along with more of my hobby projects, follow me on twitter & checkout my portfolio site