I’m hearing on twitter, mastodon, and other social networks that people don’t trust surveys of developer opinions or needs. I’m here to say, good, you probably shouldn’t!

Every source of information has a bias of some kind. You know you are doing the right thing when you find directional alignment across different sources of information and take into account their biases. For example, npm installs are helpful, but they bias toward sites under active development. Sometimes that’s what you want, but as a single source of truth, it would fall short.

There are some fantastic (public!) resources for understanding developer sentiment, and some notes about how to put them into context to understand their biases. Are there other resources that should be included? Put them in the comments! or @ me on any of the social networks

Keep in mind, each of these can be both fantastic and biased. Check things like sample size, participant selection, and subsection of the ecosystem represented.