Choosing the right tool for the right job

In software engineering, it’s a quite common problem to pick a tool that doesn’t fit properly with a projects’s purpose. Picking a toolset might seem like a small thing at the beginning of a project, but later can end up being an over-engineered or under-engineered one. And refactoring an already developed app to resolve these issues is not easy at all if not almost infeasible considering the time & resource one has to invest. In denkwerk, we always face such challenge as we step into a wide variety of projects from time to time.

Projects come in with different requirements, goals, deadlines, budgets, etc, which leads us to our thinking table before each & every project. And selecting the right tool demands at least a minimum amount of exposure to all of the available options. For example, we’ll share some of our JavaScript team’s challenges as the JavaScript platforms offer way more choices and often makes the deciding task a bit difficult for us.

There is only one way to tell if a tool or toolset is fit for a project. To try out the tool & understand the pros & cons. No matter how much we read about something or research, it’s always hard to judge a tool or toolset without hands on experience. So, we try our best to do experiments with different tools in denkwerk, especially when we do our in-house projects.

Frontend development is a denkwerk strength

As we think our stronger side is design and frontend development, there are quite a few options in JavaScript to pick from. There are Frameworks/Libraries like – React, Vue, Angular, Nuxt, Next, etc for frontend application development. All of these tools have their own advantages and disadvantages.

For our de facto tool we are increasingly using React more these days because of a few reasons. Technically you can build the same thing with React, that you can build with Angular or Vue, or other less known good tools (and vice versa). But, as a JavaScript team, we just love how React enables us to think purely in JavaScript and giving us almost all of the flexibility the language offers. We don’t need to learn much new syntactical sugar to write our applications and focus on writing code. Also, the community and huge support for React makes us trust this tool as a safe bet for a long running project. Having said that, we don’t look down upon in any way to other tools, we invite the different ideas into our team or other teams as well to get a sense of the whole environment rather than being tool agnostic.

We do the practical check: from theory to practice

We tried different tools, for example: we used VueJS for a different team who were coming from a design/template-design background as we thought it’s way more easier for them to catch the pure html like templating syntax in Vue. It made the learning and understanding of a JavaScript frontend framework way more easier for the team rather them make the whole team learn React right away.