Hi there!
Nowadays one of the main skills of a developer is to find right library/package/tool. Otherwise, months or even years of work can be wasted.
Of course, there are some most obvious ways to find popular/trending stuff:
- Google (searching subjects you are interested in)
- Github (trending, observing what your followees like)
- Twitter (you should subscribe to industry activists)
However that's well known things. But there have to be other approaches. For instance, there is cool Chrome extension I found few months ago:
But maybe there is more?
How do you find the right tools for your work?
Latest comments (7)
That's the difference between developers and "coders": Developers write and publish libraries/packages/tools. "Coders" glue them together and consider that to be "creative work".
So, to come back to your question: I don't find "hot packages". I write them. :-)
BTW the really interesting question is (why I made OP actually): when you start writing new lib, don't you search for already existing ones, so that you would not invent a wheel?
I do. And there's rarely one that fully fits what I would prefer. Yes, I am willing to sacrifice some of my wishes - but sometimes, writing everything on my own is notably easier than working around the shortcomings of existing solutions.
Thank you for sharing your experience, I love to hear that there are experienced developers that do what I do sometimes as well.
Thanks for your opinion! However I'd argue with that. I write libraries myself, and still my need for searching good underlying libs is higher than ever. Also, I see guys who write very popular libraries still use a lot of dependencies sometimes, and that's sometimes inevitable, especially for relatively high-level packages.
But I see, that you are a C guy. So you might like to write zero-dependency libs, which is respectable, but not the only case :-)
Which can easily turn into dependency hell which should at least let you have a second thought before blindly using it. I know that it "saves time" - but in 2018, we have people who use multi-GB Docker containers to deploy a three-megabyte "application". Enjoy using mobile networks for that, e.g. in an emergency... :-)
I am also a Delphi, Lisp/Racket, FASM, C++, C#, ... guy. But yes, I like to write and use libraries with as few external dependencies as possible.
Agree. OS-size-like Docker containers are convenient for CI & deploy though. But that's a matter of preference/available resources/etc.
P.S. That languages list is impressive, to say the least!