[franciscop]

Has the complexity mostly come from React or from Node? I'm doing a small Node library from a similar but casual teaching perspective (all those manual middleware should be there by default IMO) so I'm quite interested in leaning your Node.js pain points.

[ryanbrunner]

Node (well Express) is not a problem at all, save maybe authentication and database concepts (which are a slog no matter what language you're working with for new developers). I think Express is actually more suited in some ways for complete beginners than Rails is.