How I Built a React Templating Tool in Ruby

I’m sure we’re all familiar with DRY programming principles. Don’t Repeat Yourself. Though I try my best to follow this when I’m developing an application, I feel like I’ve wasted countless hours on the same initial steps every time I start a project.

It seems like the first day is spent on setting up the directory structure I’ll use, looking up the same libraries every single time to make sure I initialize them properly, and writing the same CSS boilerplate over and over. If you did this a hundred times, you would have wasted a solid month of your life just setting things up. Cue the infomercial music — there has to be a better way!

Well, there are solutions out there, but none that I actually liked.

For anyone who wants to skip the story and see the product, check out the CRAT repo on Github.

What’s a compulsive programmer to do?

Well… build. I had wanted this for quite a while and I kept putting it off and putting it off, and grumbling each time I started a new project. So, needless to say, I had a ton of ideas for how to do this. As we all know, most of the cool programming ideas we get are super easy to implement and almost always work.