A mental model I like to employ is what I call a Look Back. As web developers we drown in homongous tooling, marvelous libraries, programming pattern of the month, fancy-schmancy. Every time I encounter something new that I would like to employ I take a step back and instead of looking at it as the shiny new thing, I pretend it's something old that has existed for a few years.

Then I ask my self, now that the glow has faded and I wind down my exitement. Do I need it? Is it all that great?

The answer is often no.