Since we're talking about Kevin Mitnick on Hacker News, I have to mention:
I recently re-read "Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier". It was published in 1991 and the first third of the book provides an early contemporary account of Kevin Mitnick. It's a great book that I first read in my high school library in the 90s and it completely captured my imagination.
However, I had never connected the dots that the subject of the last third of the book was Robert Tappan Morris, creator of the Morris worm, who went on to cofound Y Combinator! Paul Graham is also quoted in the book.
The book has aged pretty great. They added an updated epilogue in 1995 in the early part of the Free Kevin era, but honestly re-listening to the book in 2025, I was wondering where the updated Y Combinator epilogue was!
Taylor's response to a similar thread on Reddit[1]:
Hey all! Kinda surprised this has "taken off" haha
It has nothing to do with raising money. It has everything to do with the fact that based on the data we have, there is a large increase in the number of people trying Laravel who haven't coded before or are getting deeper into web development for the first time. That is a good thing!
The previous guidelines would have potentially directed them to configure Nginx or FrankenPHP manually, and while that is certainly possible for experienced devs, it's not the path to success for someone new to the framework.
We want them to be able to get their projects online as smoothly as possible, so that hopefully they become a long-lasting member of our awesome community.
It is no secret that PHP has a "pipeline problem". If you look at the year-over-year data from GitHub, PHP developers only grew 5%, JavaScript + TypeScript grew almost 90%. We have to get more people into our community and enjoying what's possible here. Previously, learning PHP from scratch was a barrier, now, thanks to AI, it's not. This is a unique opportunity to dramatically expand who can bring their ideas to life using Laravel.
In fact, I already have friends in "real life" who are building Laravel apps. They have never coded before.
Does that mean Laravel is going to just cater to "vibe coders"? Absolutely not. We're still building deeply technical features and content for experienced devs who are operating at high scale. But, it is existentially important to the health of the ecosystem and PHP itself that we do a good job getting people up and running on Laravel. They aren't going to know as much as you guys - even Forge can be overwhelming to them. Cloud gives them a simple on-ramp to production that doesn't require much technical knowledge. This is there to facilitate that.
That being said, we've moved this guideline to a "deployment" guideline folder so it's easy to disable or modify or remove to have your own deployment recommendations built right into your Boost install. And, of course, Boost itself is not included with Laravel by default.
Love this! I did this in 2020 and until today I hadn't seen anyone else who had done it. If anyone is tempted, I recommend finishing the job with Micro-Mesh. IIRC, I went up to 12,000 grit and it results in a nicely polished look that catches the light beautifully.[1] I bet it would look even more striking on the actual black MacBooks we have today.
Update on this: We do now include Turbo by default and the "Cable Collections" feature in the linked video has been completely reimplemented by the CableReady team in a feature called "Updatable", which we now use in Bullet Train. You can learn more about it at https://cableready.stimulusreflex.com/guide/updatable.html . Very grateful for the work they did on this and grateful to not have to maintain a proprietary reactivity library going forward!
Not at all! You can use Bullet Train and Avo together or you can use them independently. Avo is the recommended admin library to use with Bullet Train.
Yes, this is true that we lean heavily into Tailwind CSS by default. However, when I implemented our "new" component system in 2021, I designed it so that there was a path forward for Bullet Train on vanilla CSS or Bootstrap if anyone wanted to implement it. I don't have any plans to do it myself, but people (including Tamik, the original theme author for Bullet Train) have expressed an interest. I'd love to see it happen. You can get a sense for how this would be possible from our theme docs at https://bullettrain.co/docs/themes.
Wow, hi everyone! Was just about to walk over for the first day of RailsConf when a friend let me know we were #1 here! Honored!
I'm the original creator of Bullet Train, although a number of people now work on it. It's been a fun journey to this point!
When I first started building Bullet Train, it was a relatively unique offering. There weren't that many full-featured "SaaS starter kits" out there, although there was some prior art. The biggest inspiration for Bullet Train was what Laravel Spark was at the time. In fact, one of the guys who had got me into Rails in the first place had started building his next product on Laravel so they could take advantage of Spark!
These days there are an abundance of SaaS starter kits available in most ecosystems. I've had the pleasure of meeting and interacting with the authors of a bunch of high-quality starter kits built in different languages and frameworks and some of them have told me they were inspired in part by Bullet Train. I love that.
If you're interested in Rails and SaaS, we're running a conference in Athens, Greece on June 1–2 this year and we'd love to have you! https://railssaas.com
Yeah, you're not alone. Aaron posted a thread on Twitter that shares the inside skinny on what it took to ship this course (https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1638191349261377539) but I had an early peek into the work he was doing on this course, and there was a clear inflection point in the project when he joined Planetscale and had the benefit of being able to focus a substantial amount of his time on it in addition to all the work other members of the team there were able to contribute to it. Very grateful that Planetscale unlocked this so it's available as a free resource instead of having to be behind a paywall to support its creator.
1. Yes, it does. I use AdBlock Pro.
2. Yes, it does. I've been using Safari as my primary browser as a Rails developer for at least the past decade and have always found the developer tools at least adequate. I don't use the developer tools on other browsers heavily, so I don't know if I might be missing something.
Hey KRains, author of Bullet Train here! Congratulations on your launch and making the front page of HN! I know how great a feeling that is after all your hard work!
I disagree that Bullet Train is "really overpriced". The features it provides to customers can save them hundreds of hours of development time in total. There are individual features in Bullet Train (the teams functionality, the Stripe integration, outbound webhooks, scaffolding real-time chat conversation threads onto models and an inbox for all of them, Zapier integration, just to name a few) that would each save most development teams at least $1,450 in development costs, and that's before you take into account the power of Super Scaffolding for code generation.
Bullet Train will save most development teams months in effort right off the bat. That's well worth $1,450 to the customers who have been able to get to market faster with components they know are being used and maintained across many different products. Bullet Train is only two years old, and there are already folks running seven-figure businesses around products that cost five-figures to build using Bullet Train. I'm not trying to imply it's magic, I'm just trying to point out that there are situations where $1,450 can be a no-brainer.
I love that you're starting with an open source base. If I knew when I started what I now know after two years of selling Bullet Train, I would probably do something similar. But you will need (as I've needed and as others who are doing similar projects have needed) help along the way. (For example, you'll definitely want to get the support of a designer.) Unless you want to bring those people on as partners, that help will cost you money, sometimes lots of it, so make sure you're charging enough for your premium components to pay for the help you need to make the product a success and the best it can be.
Honestly, can you think of a smarter move on the part of Microsoft than making Nat Friedman (a veteran of the Open Source community) CEO of Github? I completely trust this guy to do as good a job as can be done of guiding Github forward as a product and a platform, now that the venture capitalists are no longer in the picture.
Hey Weston, with regard to servers and deployment, I think Heroku is a very turn-key solution. These days you can have a default `app.json` in your project and use it to click a button to deploy your app to a totally new development or production server including any databases and third-party add-ons you need provisioned for the app. It's pretty magical. For CI, I use Codeship. The combination of those two vastly minimizes my responsibility for infrastructure.
On the development side, I still think Rails is an excellent choice, but I also felt a lot of the same pain you're expressing, but instead of with server configuration, I started feeling it more specifically with the redundancy of putting together the same libraries over and over for each app.
To try to revive the joy of creating new projects, I created Bullet Train (https://bullettrain.co), which I describe as "Rails on Rails". It's an app template with authentication (Devise), authorization (CanCanCan), subscriptions (Koudoku), teams, invitations, OAuth integrations, etc. all wrapped in a consistent theme with a full feature-level test suite.
It also has a powerful code generation/scaffolding engine for pumping out CRUD views and controllers for the web, API endpoints, API documentation, and soon it'll handle your Zapier integration as well. (Posted a demo video of this here at https://twitter.com/andrewculver/status/934251715175395328) It also has a thin layer of conventions on top of vanilla Rails, like namespacing the public vs. account sections of an app. It's stuff that most of us were doing previously, just slightly different from app to app, and this is an attempt to standardize so we can build other magic on top of it.
As a demo, a few months ago I used Bullet Train + Heroku to build and launch a simple Trello clone in two hours: https://bt-cardboard.herokuapp.com/ . It's limited, and I haven't come back to it since, but I thought the end result was a powerful example of what you can get done quickly when you're using the right tools. (I have a video recording of the entire process which I'll upload to YouTube if anyone is interested in seeing it.)
Anyway, I wouldn't normally peddle my wares on HN, but the whole point of Bullet Train is to try to achieve new levels of developer productivity and happiness, which seemed relevant to the question you were asking. There's nothing quite like this in the Python world (I'm frequently told by Python developers,) but there probably should be, and I imagine it's just a matter of time before there is.
Thanks for providing such detailed and thoughtful feedback. I actually did build this app on top of https://bullettrain.co in less than two hours. I actually recorded the entire process and I'm happy to share the video privately. (You can DM me on Twitter or email me at [email protected] .) I'll post it publicly once someone is able to edit out the parts where I spend 10-15 minutes debugging really simple CSS issues, etc. I provided some more context on this project's purpose here: https://twitter.com/andrewculver/status/968215988436004864