Honestly Sam

What are my Options

A while ago I had this idea of making a "high street" website where you could find a load of different online shops on each side of the street. Maybe this is more realistic with the metaverse now, but I can't see any added value from this any longer.

I do, however, see some added value in creating a storefront for online tooling. The slightly tricky part would be deciding on the level of abstraction for the tool categories, but for argument's sake, let us choose front-end frameworks as an example.

Imagine you are in a DIY shop, in the section selling masking tape, paint and paint brushes. There is a whole wall with many rows of differently sized brushes and rollers, and then a shelf with tape, stanley knives and roller trays, then behind you, pallets upon pallets of paint.

On every product, you can see the description, the brand, the colour, and, by virtue of the aisle you are in, the problem you are trying to solve.

You could have sections for each language. The product card could scale slightly with its popularity. There could be a minimum standard which the items must offer, there could be metadata like what natural languages the community speaks.

Or better yet, is there a niche in the YouTube market for an MKBHD equivalent in the tooling space? I want a channel dedicated to reviewing what frameworks are like to work with, both "out of the box" and "after six months".

Fundamentally, the problem I am interested in seeing solved is a visualisation of the options available and how that changes over time. How does the most popular of a given language or library compare to the most popular of a different type of tool? Exactly how much more widely used is Excel to LibreOffice? or R to MatLab? Or MySQL to OracleDB? As a software architect, how can I present my intended solution to the business in a comparative way? How can I reasonably analyse the risk in using a given tool without knowing where that tool stands among its competitors? How can I easily illuminate this to my client?

Would a meta-analysis of similar libraries allow for a better understanding of exactly where the level of abstraction is best drawn?

Thoughts? Leave a comment