Gauge ecosystem impact

[LeaVerou]

There are certain low level APIs and capabilities that are primarily used "under the hood" by tools and libraries, but not directly by developers, who may not even be aware their tools use them.These features will tend to get low usage/awareness counts, since their use cases are niche to the average developer, yet their actual use counts are pretty high.

It would be good to have a question in the survey that attempts to gauge the respondent's "impact" on the ecosystem, so we had the option of studying the needs of tool developers separately.

We currently have this question:

However there are several issues with it:

• It's hard for open source developers to gauge how many users their open source project has. Do they look at npm installs? Likes? E.g. Npm installs could be misleading for projects that aren't primarily used via npm.
• There are fundamental differences wrt impact between open source tools, products, internal tooling. Do we need to distinguish?
• Do they answer about their total impact or their most popular project? Former might be harder to gauge but latter may not give us the full picture (30 projects averaging 1000 users each are likely more impactful than one project with 10,000 users, depending on the overlap)
• If they work on B2D companies, do they answer about the number of users of the overall product, even though they may only be responsible for a tiny part of it? That could really skew the results.
• Perhaps we should focus it on open source projects? We could even ask them to list repos of their e.g. 3 most popular projects, then we could do our own investigation, but that involves more engineering effort.