Choose your software battles wisely

Having a large, thriving community of developers or creators actually using a products is such an incredible time saver.

Sure, you could choose a less-used open source product with a smaller community because you have some romantic idea that because of reason Y it’s actually superior product (or has the potential to be). Then you go about digging into solving certain challenges yourself but there is a high probability you will eventually cave and join the masses using the other product. It’s happened to me multiple times and just meant wasted time and energy. If you’re working with something that’s open source, the community is everything. And it’s a pretty efficient environment or market too. People are pretty good at choosing what works best and voting it up with their time. If you think people are overlooking another piece of software there might be some merit to that at the time but very quickly the product chosen by the crowd will surpass the less chosen option. One just can’t compete with a massive wave of people iterating on something.

So chose your battles. Really question the merits of choosing any open source tool without a significant community, especially if there are other competitive options with big communities. You’re likely making a hasty decision about details that don’t actually matter and you’ll end up investing far much time trying to prove the crowd wrong before relenting. In open source, an army of one shouldn’t try to compete.