No mention of the rails:update rake task, which is a very valuable tool to get your boilerplate updated. I'm guessing at GitHub there is so much customization over the years that they wouldn't get much out of it, but it's still a valuable exercise to run through, and it's worthwhile to keep your boilerplate aligned as much as possible since it makes gems, documentation, and everything else more likely to align with shared community experience.
Also, I want to add a big proviso to the lesson "Upstream your tooling instead of rolling your own". Historically in ruby, and now even moreso in node, the ease of pushing new packages and the trendiness of the language at times has led to a lot of churn and abandoning of packages. The trick is to include stable dependencies, and that requires quite a bit of experience and tea-leaf reading to do right. Often times maintaining your own stripped down internal lib can be a performance and maintenance cost win over including a larger batteries-included lib that ends up being poorly supported over time. For example, a lot of people got burned by using the state_machine gem that at one time was very hot and actively maintained but went on to get left in an aggressive limbo (https://github.com/pluginaweek/state_machine).
Also, I want to add a big proviso to the lesson "Upstream your tooling instead of rolling your own". Historically in ruby, and now even moreso in node, the ease of pushing new packages and the trendiness of the language at times has led to a lot of churn and abandoning of packages. The trick is to include stable dependencies, and that requires quite a bit of experience and tea-leaf reading to do right. Often times maintaining your own stripped down internal lib can be a performance and maintenance cost win over including a larger batteries-included lib that ends up being poorly supported over time. For example, a lot of people got burned by using the state_machine gem that at one time was very hot and actively maintained but went on to get left in an aggressive limbo (https://github.com/pluginaweek/state_machine).