[remark] My biases when choosing open-source tools

by Ciprian Dorin Craciun (https://volution.ro/ciprian) on 

I reflect on my preferences when it comes to choosing open-source tools I need to rely upon.

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It's quite difficult to clearly pinpoint my trade, because I do development (mostly system related and backend), system administration (mostly Linux), lightweight cloud operations (mainly VM's and other IaaS services), and some security (sandboxing, applied cryptography).

However, at least in the last few years, when selecting the tooling I need to rely upon, I have developed (many more) and observed quite a few biases, that I would like to reflect on.

Now, before dwelling into that, I would like to stress that I'm not averse to one programming language or another, as I've programmed in C and a bit C++ (in a former life), quite a bit in Java (though not much lately), recently Rust and Go, experimented in Erlang, even toyed around with Scheme / Lisp variants, and dabbled in Python (mainly 2 and now 3), and tied everything together with Bash. So I can't say I like any language over any other; in fact I think I would especially enjoy a Scheme-based Rust-inspired syntax, with a runtime model of Erlang, with the build tooling of Go, while preserving the performance of C/Rust. :)


But, as hinted initially, when choosing the tools I want to invest my time into, I mainly settle on those that have (or lack as is the case) the following traits:


That's about it!

Instead of a conclusion, which I don't have, as said initially these are my personal biases which are not at all objective! To some, many of these might seem too restrictive, but then again these are my personal choices, based on my personal experience within the field.