I want a website that rates packages in npm with more possibly useful heuristics:

  num dependencies (shallow, deep)
  total size of node_modules
  installed size (correct use of npmignore etc)
  code quality (McCabe, jslint, jshint)
  typescript/flow/ jsdoc string types etc
  test coverage
  frequency of releases
  documentation coverage
  documentation text analysis: pretentiousness, overly laconic, bro speak
  has a F-ing README so we could at least have some idea what the hell it is
  number of blog and link references
  number of authors
  reputation of authors based on their other packages
  open/closed issues

Make the stats available so others can build indices and ranking algorithms based on these.

Time since last commit, as well as average size and type of the last few commits would also be useful ensure meaningful features or bug fixes are probably being made.

See if others are using it, read the documentation, read the issues list, and/or read the source code. React-router-redux only has 216 lines of code! (Not counting tests, etc.)

Yes, this is basically my heuristic too. The part that's maddening is the low signal to noise ratio. It might take you six hours of googling to realize the library you need is called cthulhu-suspenders or something. You might have been able to write your own module in that time, then upload it to NPM, thus perpetuating the vicious cycle. :)

My heuristic is:

1. Google for a blog comparing them, and eliminate any candidates with major red flags

2. Go with the one that has the most stars on it's github repo.

So if there are no blog posts (1) then we all do 2 and then we suffer from first mover lock in.

>then we all do 2 and then we suffer from first mover lock in.

I don't find JS has a "first mover lock-in" problem. If anything, it has the opposite...

IDK, I'm hoping that there are enough people who don't check stars and choose a repo simply because it was the first one they found or because they think it works better with their existing code or for other reasons. And honestly there are many times where I've been that person.

Make a decision and run with it. Be confident enough in yourself or your team that you can pivot off that decision if it ends up being the wrong one. Often before you have enough information to make the decision at a level of precision that makes you completely comfortable.

I'm coming up on a decade in web application development and I feel like this is one of the most critical skills. It also took me an embarrassingly long time to develop. I think engineering, in allowing transparency downward into each level of the "stack", engenders the opposite in it's practitioners.

I wanted to transitioned from browserify to webpack and test that sweet redux hot reloading. I mostly got webpack working but I never understood with certainty which hot module reloader was the current one. It seemed everything on GitHub was deprecated and any boilerplate was outdated (one month old ? Forget it).

That ecosystem can be impressive but it's madness to keep up with it.

Picking out libraries, to some developers I work with, has become the same as shopping for a TV as Best Buy. They try to get the one with the bestest of everything, and just end up with a POS that no one wants to watch TV on.

What can ya do? This is where we find ourselves today. It's a mess. But what if I told you there was another way...?

Well, obviously, the correct choice is to use React Server and let us make all the decisions for you ;)

Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/927/

;)