Find New Javascript Libraries
Learning about new libraries is more than searching Google or GitHub. Below are a few suggestions for discovery:
Existing libraries
Open source libraries are run by a maintainer or team of maintainers. Maintainers tend to be passionate about software and work on many projects. You can jump from library to maintainer profiles to see where else they contribute.
For example, at the time of this writing, Antoine du Hamel is on the Node.js Technical Steering Committee. On their GitHub commits are visible for uppy, a library for JavaScript file uploads. This is less a quality guarantee of uppy and more an example of how to randomly walk from an existing library to new ones.
Even minimal exposure to libraries is powerful. For example, when confronted with a file upload problem, it is tempting to solve it from scratch. The temptation decreases if you are aware of libraries like uppy. Maybe the library solves browser quirks or saves your team dozens of hours, freeing up time for the unique parts of your project. The discussion and choice is easier to navigate with library awareness.
Hacker News
Hacker News is a social website run by Y Combinator, the popular startup incubator. The discussion leans technical and critical.
Algolia has a performant way to search HN, making it easier to learn about how others solve problems. For example, you can search for the most popular stories about React state management from the past year.
Comments are also searchable. For example, the most popular comments about Mobx from the last month.
Skimming the Top Links list once a week is another way to keep updated on popular submissions. While reading HN, you stumble across many blogs.
Technical blogs
People write in blogs about their experiences with software and with problems. HN is one way to find these blogs. For example, there is often a thread about sharing personal blogs.
A blog board also exists at blogs.hn. Use "Find in Page" to search for a term and see what you find.
From a blog you can discover:
- An author passionate about new or familiar topics
- Projects contributed to by the author
- Libraries the author recommends
- Libraries the author used to solve tough problems
Fellow engineers
Ask engineers around you or who you worked with before about libraries. If they write a blog, give it a read and see what you find.
Tomer, a former coworker, writes about a variety of topics. They made Keyalesce which allows tuple and objects in JavaScript to be used as the keys in a map or the values in a set.
Rauno, another previous coworker, writes a lot about interface design. They also work on nifty projects like Inspx, a layout inspector, and ⌘K, a React-based command menu.
Keeping track of discoveries
Organization and memorization of libraries is left as an exercise for the reader. Try as many methods as you like and keep whichever serve you.