We have a constant stream of almost daily ideas of new software products. Some are just barely enough for a good laugh, but some make it all the way to a published product. A lot of our ideas are somewhere in the middle, where in your head it's an awesome app, but you're not entirely sure if it could work. These cases often ask for a hackathon weekend and a quick prototype in order to evaluate the actual usefulness.

Using Boilerplates for Rapid Prototyping

The feeling of having a great and idea and opening your IDE and programming it right away is fantastic and extremely energizing. Unfortunately, often enough you'll need to implement some basic, unrelated functionality, like account management or API requests before you can program to your actual core idea. That takes a significant amount of your recently released energy and might cause that your prototype never gets finished. We were sick of that occurring way too often and implementing an account system for the x-th time, so we finally developed boilerplates as our starting point for future prototypes. Since it helps us so much, we were hoping that it might help some of you, too.

Current Status

If you look to our github repository, you'll currently find two boilerplates. One for our server application, based on node.js, ExpressJS and MongoDB. The other one is for an Android app with complete, implemented proxies to the previous server boilerplate. Both are under active development and far from finished. Both platforms are so fast in their development, it's hard to keep up with them and also adding new features. It's also quite likely, that there will be more boilerplates in the future!

In our next blog post, we'll introduce our node.js boilerplate.