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adam klein
adam klein

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A recipe for deciding between technologies

I've written in the past why I think choosing between technologies is extremely difficult.

So, here are my 2 cents on how to do that effectively. It's not a bullet-proof method, but I hope it will help guide you on that journey:

  • Do some unstructured and unbiased research of pure facts and verify them against different sources. Don’t make any prejudgments and don’t choose sides.
  • Look at who’s writing the article and what education they have on the subject. Try to understand if it’s a technical, experienced person, or a content writer. Check out the comments as well.
  • Find people that you trust and that face similar challenges, and share your view on development, and consult with them.
  • Write down a list of features for each technology.
  • Find the features that satisfy your needs in all options, and remove them from the list. For example, if all technologies are performant enough for you — no need to compare their performance.
  • Decide on each feature what is a pro and what is a con for you.
  • Think about the things that matter the most to you. For each technology, write down at most 3–4 pros/cons that are important for you, and ignore the rest.
  • Go over the list and see if there's any technology that you can already cross out based on the pros/cons list.
  • For the remaining techs, make a PoC, and determine the barrier of entry and the quality of the documentation.

Your choice

Remember, these are YOUR personal interpretations. Some people will see a framework’s full solution as a pro, some will see it as a con. Some don’t really care about popularity, for others, it’s the most important requirement.

Your choice will affect future developers for potentially years, so making a good research at this stage is worthwhile.

Good luck!

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