I’m a front-end developer. Whenever I need to introduce a new library or framework into the project, I always wonder if this tool is the best choice we have? How about its alternative? It always triggers my decidophobia.

I think one kind of data I can refer to is how many real repositories use it. So I crawl the JS projects on GitHub and record their dependencies usage and build a website called npmusage to check whether I should use it or not. More than 85K repositories have been fetched already.

Just learned about this “Decidiphobia” word - normally I would think to use a word like “uncertainty” or “indecisive” or something like that, but this word sounds fun and kooky! Thanks!

Some heuristics:
- is the API nice? Is the code designed/written well?
- when was the last commit on the repository? Is this a tool that needs to be updated frequently or is it abandoned? Have people made issue tickets, how fast do they get solved, are people contributing to the pull requests if the dev isn't around? If there are issues tickets still open how do they indicate the quality of the code -- for example, tickets about basic functionality not working is foreboding for the quality of the codebase.

Unfortunately the best heuristic could just be "it's used by large corporations so they will artificially keep it on life support even though it sucks" though 😝

You are a web developer.
Those are very typical symptoms.

I get the worst decidiphobia on how to structure my folders and components. If there was a tool like prettier but for folder structures that would be amazing

Don’t. Use raw js. Modern js has everything you need
Look at template tags and web components

Or you could also ditch "frameworks" and do just whatever is needed...

If you follow ECMAscript, that's the best guarantee you'll have that your code won't stop working overnight...