Web development is in a strange place. There is a lot of complexity involved with existing tooling to deploy a simple app. There have been attempts to manage this complexity through various frameworks.
Front-end frameworks aim to make building a front end manageable. Often, they make it harder for a solo engineer to write a great backend. It’s simply too much to learn for a busy adult. Luckily, HTMX makes it manageable to focus on backend development while still creating dynamic web pages. If you’re building one of the 90% of websites that don’t need a front-end framework (and you probably are), then HTMX makes it possible for engineers to create full-stack apps without one. HTMX is small (~14k min.gz’d) and dependency-free, BTW.
Full-stack frameworks like Django/Rails aim to pre-solve many common problems, like user authentication and template rendering. These are problems that an engineer primarily focused on solving a business problem or helping people shouldn’t be worrying about. These work amazingly for many indie developers and often work great with HTMX. But something to consider is that as years pass, your skill set will slowly become siloed into the Django or Rails communities. This isn’t objectively bad, but it does mean your experience in another language like Go can’t be transferred over.
Pocketbase is an “Open Source Backend for your next SaaS and Mobile app in 1 file.” It handles basic SaaS requirements such as Realtime database, Authentication, File storage, and a slick Admin dashboard. It functionally isn’t very different from other full-stack frameworks, but there is a distinct difference. The codebase is pure Golang code that is also of fantastic quality.
Golang is highly respected among the software engineering community and is a great asset to have under the tool belt. It’s designed to be extremely productive with a simple syntax, and produces safe, high-performance, portable code.
What this means for Pocketbase is that your entire app (even public files) can be compiled into a static binary and put on any server. Any engineer should be able to SSH into a server and start an executable. And if not, this is a great place to start learning.
The biggest advantage of this kind of deployment is that vendors have no way to lock you in. If you have any Linux server connected to the internet, you can monetize your software. Sure, it may be more convenient to spin up an EC2 instance, but that same code can be easily exported to any other Linux server provider, or even your own hardware.
DeploySolo is designed to bring these strong engineering principles and apply business principles to maximize the probability of success, especially for solopreneurs.
DeploySolo is a minimal SaaS boilerplate that establishes common patterns. It uses TailwindCSS and minimal views that are designed to be extended with your own custom styles. It has Stripe webhooks set up, so all you have to do is create a product and initialize your secrets. It also has some markdown to tailwind documentation rendering. It has dark mode and basic auth views. It also has HTMX integration. It’s super easy to deploy, I know you will love working with it.
It isn’t the only way to do web development, but I believe it’s a great one. DeploySolo aims to bring you from 0 to 1 on your next startup idea in record time, but also to become a great engineer in the worst case.