What framework should I use for my project?

Do you recognize this question? You have a great idea for a new side project and after 100 hours of research and looking at benchmarks you’ve finally decided what programming language to use.

Nice! Well done. So - now it’s time to search for a cool framework to use! Yay, big fun.

So you start searching things like ‘best web framework for X’. Where X is the programming language you just picked. You will find an overwhelming amount of opinions of which framework is good and which framework is bad. You will compare some features of framework Y and framework Z and conclude it’s going to be either of those two.

So you will simply Google for ‘framework Y vs. framework Z’ and guess what. You will find another million opinions of experts. Experts that checked the homepage of the framework once, experts that worked with it for three days and experts that only used framework Y since they were born. And you are back to square one. Because framework A, B, C seem like viable choices all of a sudden. Framework Y and Z are outdated and stupid, or so they say…

Why don’t you just pick a framework based on a few of the features you will need immediately instead? Just try it and ignore other people’s opinion. It gives you the opportunity to experiment with it, form your own opinion. If you don’t like it - just use another framework. It’s a side project after all…

Side note: With other people’s opinions I mean random strangers on the internet. Not colleagues or other people you respect.