
Ask HN: How to Pick the Right Tools for the Job? - jyu
There&#x27;s a trope &quot;Use the right tool for the job.&quot; At the start though, it&#x27;s hard to know what the hard bits of the job will be when the job inevitably shifts. It&#x27;s also hard for me to evaluate new tech compared to tradeoffs of familiar tech.<p>How have you successfully &#x2F; unsuccessfully tackled this?
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topicseed
Decide on a Cloud provider. Then, what services within it? Then, what client-
side languages? Then, what compute system(s). Then, what architecture to use.
Then, what libraries. Then what access patterns. And it goes on, and on, and
on.

For too long, I got paralyzed by having too many choices – from NLP
frameworks, to databases, and even CMS. The time it took me to read about all,
overthink, wait, finally decide, was so long, it just is better to try a few
key choices, and not overoptimize.

Obviously, it depends on whether or not you are building a side hustle or a
regulated product... But generally, read enough to be aware of key options,
pick a subset that makes sense (and perhaps a wildcard), implement PoCs, check
them against your key metrics (latency, readability, maintainability, code to
deploy times, vendor lock-in, or whatever else matters to you today and
tomorrow, not three years down the line when you may perhaps hypothetically
need to scale).

