zlacker

>>kaeruc+(OP)
> Yet [GitHub stars] influence serious, high stakes decisions, including which projects get used by enterprises, which startups get funded, and which companies talented professionals join.

Really? I honestly just don't believe this... if I were to believe this, I think I'd have to conclude the world is just too broken to bother rescuing.

>>saurik+Bd
One of my stock interview questions asks people how they evaluate 3rd-party dependencies for use in a production environment. So many interviewees respond with GitHub stars as their main or only criterion. It depresses me every time.

>>philbo+he
That's a very interesting question. There are so many things you can look at. How is the documentation? Who are the primary maintainers? How are they funded? What are their motivations? Are the primary maintainers active on Stack Overflow, Reddit, Discord, etc...? How many contributors are there? How does their Github issues page look? What about the Github discussion page? How many maintainers are there total? How many downloads per week on NPM (for JS libraries)? From all of these things - how long do you expect this library to be maintained? And that's just the initial qualification research, nothing about how it will impact the actual code-base.

What did I miss? What's the best answer you've ever heard? How do you evaluate 3rd party dependencies?

>>throw_+Hf
You missed: look at the actual code.

Stars only mean something because of the people who do. They're the ones leading the herd. If you're just going off the social signals, then you're just monitoring where the herd is going.

>>jart+do
Yep, this one is the headline item for me. Look at the code and, if it has further dependencies of its own, look at the code for those too.

The main question I'm asking myself while looking at the code is: if I had to fork this thing and maintain it myself, how would I feel about it? Because sometimes that happens.