Which of the 635000 NPM modules do I choose?

coreycleary.me

2 points·ccleary00··2 comments

FIRST QUESTIONS 1. DOES IT DO WHAT I NEED TO DO, AS ELEGANTLY AS I DO IT? 2. IS IT WELL DOCUMENTED? 3. IS IT SIMPLE ENOUGH THAT I CAN PERFORM A SECURITY AUDIT ON IT?

SECOND QUESTIONS 1. IS IT SUPPORTED, AND IF NOT IS IT SIMPLE ENOUGH FOR ME TO SUPPORT? 2. IS IT PRESENTED AS PRODUCTION/GA CODE?

You won't need to bother about answering the second set affirmatively if you can't do so with the first. To make a good clean decision, the answers to all the forgoing should be in the affirmative.

If you ignore the attractive module names and apply this simple hueristic faithfully, you'll find that the pool of potential production modules is not only reduced dramatically but that in some application areas the selection will actually become quite sparse.

You might say that my hueristic is incomplete, and you might be right, so feel free to add a few conditions of your own.

Note that while we're all different and have different requirements, you should still direct your efforts toward keeping the hueristic as simple and concise as possible.

This is definitely a very useful heuristic and one I follow. I might put "Is it supported?" in the first questions group though, especially if the project is for work and you need to be able to get support/troubleshooting questions answered quickly, as opposed to a "just for fun" side project where deadlines are less prevalent.

"Keeping the heuristic as simple and concise as possible" -> this is really the crux of it. In this post I listed out pre-researched modules and use cases for them, but still basically a heuristic nonetheless.

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