This is an incredibly insightful piece the difference between popularity and quality in software development.

In software development, a lot of people pick the most popular tool that can solve a given problem. Popularity is measurable: you can check the number of downloads, the number of stars, the questions and answers all over the web. Quality, on the other hand, is hard to measure…

An anecdote of a CTO trying to navigate tool selection with his development team is provided, and while his choice is out of the ordinary, the response from the peanut gallery is not. Read the whole thing (it’s short), but here’s a snippet of the author’s takeaway:

we should be extremely cautious about taking what is popular for what is good, and conversely we should not disregard something just because it didn’t gather enough stars.

This reminds me of the excellent conversation we had with Ozan Onay on episode #260 of The Changelog, where he encouraged developers everywhere to DYOR.