Inspiration
The modern development ecosystem consists of a wiiiide variety of options as to how to build your applications, and it can be hard to decide which ones best fit your and your app's specifications. I myself had trouble deciding what to use to build this site itself!
What it does
usewhat.tech is a basic web-app that asks the user numerous questions about themselves, their project, their experience with different frameworks, and more. It then uses all of these to determine which combination of technologies is best suited for the users needs. As of now, it makes recommendations on what frontend framework, backend framework, database, and hosting solution to use.
How we built it
Usewhat.tech is built very simply on plain HTML and JQuery. It accumulates all of the responses and runs various logical and mathematical formulas on the data to determine its selections.
Challenges we ran into
Tweaking the formulas was rather difficult. It took much longer than expected to perfect the recommendation formulas specifically for the frontend and database. I used trial and error to test them, which ended up taking an annoyingly long time.
Additionally, the fundamental issue with the concept of this app is that these selections are purely opinion based. Some people may have had different experiences with the mentioned frameworks than my own, so another person designing this app would likely have had much different results. I tried to source opinions on things such as learning curve and power through reading numerous articles on medium comparing the various frameworks such that it wouldn't be purely based on my own opinions.
Additionally, I registered the usewhat.tech domain a little bit late, and Github pages refuses to acknowledge it at the time of writing. This unfortunately means that I don't believe the final demo will be on a .tech domain.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
I really like how the recommendation algorithm turned out. After countless hours fine tuning it, I can find that I agree with its decisions a good most of the time.
Additionally, I was able to cut down on doing DOM manipulation by using HTML custom elements. I really like the system devised to handle changes between questions.
What's next for usewhat.tech
One thing I'd really like to have done is use more images. I was able to put a few in, but the final page looks a bit bland with just black text on a white screen.
Additionally, this app only supports technologies for web applications. Desktop and Mobile applications have a whole new scene of frameworks that could be used, and this app would benefit from offering recommendations on those.
Finally, more languages and more libraries would never hurt anyone. I only picked what I believed to be the largest frameworks for this rendition, but there are countless more, each with their own specific use cases that could be explored.
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