This week I attended this year's iteration of the great Domain-Driven Design Europe together with many of my colleagues from Comsysto Reply GmbH, coming together to Amsterdam from Munich, Berlin, Regensburg, Wien and Zagreb.
After each conference day, a quiet feeling of unsureness creeped up on me and some of my colleagues and slowly became more and more dominant: there are so many complex domains you might encounter and there exist so many methods for each of them - but there is so little evidence what works and what doesn't, I have pretty limited experience to draw from, and new paradigms emerge constantly while others become obsolete. With that, how does one ever reach the point where he or she is confident enough to make any decision at all?
Obviously this is ridiculously hard questions to answer well. The abstraction I thought of to come moderately close to an answer - and by thinking about it soothing this strange feeling - is pattern matching: finding the best match between the problem at hand and a set of patterns, where the identified pattern of the match entails the decision. Fundamentally, good decision makers are simply defined by being very good at pattern matching. On the one hand they have many patterns to search trough in their pattern set and on the other hand they find a reasonable match quickly. But the decisions themselves are simply implied by the matches.
On the two aspects where good decision makers dominate, you can also grow. Extend your personal pattern set, by exploring and experimenting with technologies, going to (good) conferences and reading books about your environment. And become faster in finding the correct match by simulating scenarios and their implications, ideally trying them out live in the flesh if your environment allows it.
Will you ever know all patterns? No, never. Will you ever be as fast as the best decision makers in your environment? Probably not. But by upskilling, you will increase your pattern set, you will find better matches, you will find them more quickly and ultimately you will make decisions with confidence. This realisation made me optimistic and removed a lot of that unsureness I described - maybe it helps you as well?
