The future of react-boilerplate


For the past year react-boilerplate has evolved beyond my ideas and code to being a true community effort. There is a team of collaborators who make sure issues are taken care of, features introduced and new releases prepared. In fact, for the past few months I have barely, if even, done 1% of the work.

It’s time to make that official by moving it to its own organisation on GitHub. You will now find react-boilerplate at react-boilerplate/react-boilerplate! 🎉

Organisations are awesome

This might seem like a small difference but is actually a big deal. I have been the bottleneck in react-boilerplate’s development for too long. The team has done an amazing job of managing incoming issues and pull requests, adding features and fixing bugs, but they’ve always had to wait for me to make the last calls.

That’s unsustainable. With all the activity, it’s borderline impossible for any single person to keep up.

No Benevolent Dictator For Life?

For the longest time I’ve thought boilerplates, which need to be opinionated to be useful, have to have a BDFL. (Benevolent Dictator For Life) I told myself that moving to an organisation would decrement its value and lead to its eventual demise. The reality is entirely different, and I’m grateful to Sebastien, Oliver and many others for continuously pointing that out to me.

By moving to an organisation the community officially owns the project, so the team can make critical calls with or without me. This will speed up development, tighten the release cycle and means the decisions we make will be much better. I’m now Just Another Maintainer™️ of the project instead of the BDFL.

I’m super excited about the future of react-boilerplate. Huge props to the amazing team:

There’s never been a better time to start a new React project. Enjoy!


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