I was introduced to the world of consulting via project templates/scaffolds. One evening, I attended a coworking meetup where one of the partners of the consulting firm where the meetup was being held was working on a project scaffold in order to spin up new projects more quickly since they had opinions about what exactly should go into the project and what shouldn’t beyond what rails new was offering. Instead of having to customize the project every time with those details, their people could now clone this project and get started more quickly.
This idea has stayed with me in the years after I joined and left that company, and now that I’m spinning up a lot more of my own projects, I found myself wanting to have a scaffold like that, but because different projects come with different tech stacks, what made more sense was to create a skill that would pick the things that I wanted in each project no matter the stack.
It’s still being fleshed out, but here is the link to what is really the start of how I want projects to be built. It includes things like an installed skill to keep setup up to date, self-updating documentation around commands, and a full testing suite (linting, unit testing, e2e testing, test coverage reporting) so that testing is built in right from the start.
It asks a bunch of questions at the start in terms of what stack you want to use and what you want to include and then goes off and does the installation.
Things I am still working out
- how to use mutation testing properly in a project since that’s new to me
- better instructions for the linter
- better instructions for the e2e suite
- splitting off writing testing as skills
Since this is the way I like to do things, it might not fit whatever you want, but I hope it can serve as inspiration.