Comment by Kleo Petrov on "How do you answer questions like "Why did you choose X over Y" where X and Y are two competing technologies and you simply prefer X to Y?"

CommentHow do you answer questions like "Why did you choose X over Y" where X and Y are two competing technologies and you simply prefer X to Y?

Kleo Petrov

Professional human being for 29 years

Nov 16, 2015

-Hey man, did you hear about the new project? The client will give us the freedom to choose whichever tech we want! He just want it to look "cool". Isn't that great?! Which one will you choose?

-It depends. Probably X.

-WHAAAAT?! Didn't you hear about Y, it's awesome! People are loving it. It's new and modern and the community behind it is growing every day. Let's build it with Y.

-Calm your horses, Stevie! Do you really want to jump in the water, without even knowing how deep it is? Think about it, do you want to maintain a project, build with something you and I don't even know that well. Do you want to loose your mind on fixing "that" bug or implementing "that" feature, just because we chose Y "`cus the cool kids are using it". What about extensibility, maintainability, scalability? Let's do a research tomorrow morning and find which one works best. We may find Y is the right tool after all.

-Man, you know you broke my dreams, right?

-I know, Stevie, I know. The next drink is on me!

Kleo Petrov

Professional human being for 29 years

Nov 16, 2015

Absolutely! Although I took the path of "old vs new", I think it's worth mentioning. You and Jan covered most of the things that can be said about the topic. I just added a little spice.

Which is very true when talking about new technology vs. old. It's a more nuanced conversation when it comes to two "good-enough" maturity projects. Spring Boot vs. Dropwizard. C# vs. Java. CentOS vs. Ubuntu. AWS vs. Azure. Puppet vs. Ansible. Express vs. Koa. MariaDB vs. PostgreSQL

Any of those choices above could be the correct answer, and in most cases, you could completely swap one for the other, and the project would be just as much a success (the feature sets largely overlap). In this case, it's about if edge-case features matter to you, or how experienced your team is on a given platform. In the case where neither matter (you're equally inexperienced or experienced, the feature-parity fits your requirements, and the communities are equally engaged), it mostly comes down to some "gut feeling" by your most senior devs.

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