Tech-debt, new features and the road ahead.

🎉 Here it is, issue number one.

ZippyStarter was born out of a challenge called 1ktober, the idea was to generate 1k in a month by building something. Being a complete newb to Indie Hacking, I didn’t expect much, so I used it as a proverbial kick up the backside to get moving as I’d been thinking about doing something for a while.

In my rush to get something live as quickly as I could, I made a few mistakes, and created tech-debt that I just had to pay back. That’s me I suppose. I could have swept it under the rug, but I’m hell-bent on quality and customer service so I knew I’d circle back around to deal with them.

In today’s email

• I paid back the tech-debt I owed you

• New features

• The road ahead

Here’s the tech-debt I paid back

I’m dogfooding ZippyStarter, discovering bugs and fixing them as I go.

I didn’t configure shadcn/ui correctly

When I kicked off ZippyStarter theming was an afterthought, but I realise that was a mistake and theming should be a core feature. I’ve refactored the entire codebase so that it complies with shadcn/ui themes.

I peppered the codebase with lots of dark: classes

From a maintenance point of view, this is a nightmare. Light and Dark themes are now managed in: globals.css via custom properties that are associated with classes configured in tailwind.config.ts.

I didn’t make enough templates

Most pages had template code baked into them, that code has been abstracted into template files, this will come in handy when I start to demonstrate templates, will be handy for re-use, and makes page files easy to manage.

New features

Docs

I’ve documented most of the key features and how to use them, please take a look and let me know what you think, also let me know if you’ve had any pain-points that aren’t covered.

Theming

This is important if you want to customise ZippyStarter to suit a brand, or to add your own stamp.

I wrote about theming in the docs, if you spot an issue let me know.

Theme customizer

This is a cool feature that I added so themes can be tested and tweaked, the config can be copied and pasted into your globals.css file if you would like.

Check out this quick video to see it in action.

Framer motion

I gave in to Framer Motion, it transforms simple sites into stunning sites. You’ll see a range of uses from page transitions and navigation animations to the updated <LogoMarquee/> component that can be used to showcase logos from different companies.

The road ahead

OK, so where am I heading with this? The truth is, I have an idea about where I want to take things, but really need feedback from you to help understand if I’m going in the right direction.

If you can spare a few minutes for a chat please book a slot where I’ll share what I’m up to and get your feedback.

I’d love to find out what you’ve been building with ZippyStarter, so feel free to share with me, you can even tweet about it and tag me using my handle: @MorganFeeney.

Until next time,

Morgan

P.S. If you’re on the fence about buying, there’s never going to be a better time to buy than now. There’s 6 left at the current price of $49.95 (50% off) and the price will likely go up.