Hi Andrey,

You make some great points re developers’ built-in tooling biases (I have mine too!). And I so appreciated the pointing out of tool judgments being passed, often without a whit of context. The one thing that I would add in tooling choice for a business that intends to scale up with locally hired help is to do an hour or so of quick and dirty research to see which technical tool skills are in relatively ample supply in one’s own area. Some searching on LinkedIn for people within a region, such as “software engineer python” vs. “software engineer rails” can provide a hint about relative popularity.

Likewise, for open source tools, check the git commit histories and try to make an educated guess whether the tool has enough momentum to sustain for several years. Few things are as painful as making lateral migrations, porting an app/website from tool platform A to tool platform B just because the supporting momentum isn’t around (either in terms of local developer talent or in case of open source, (mostly) bugs and (some) features aren’t being addressed quickly enough in the community.

Thanks for taking the time to jot down your experiences and observations.