I see this often with both new and old developers, they have one way of doing a thing and when presented with a new problem they will fall back to what they are used to even if it’s not the optimal solution. It will probably work if you bruteforce it into your usual patterns but sometimes, a different approach is much easier to implement and maintain as long as you are willing to learn it, and more importantly - know it exists in the first place.
On a less abstract level, I guess my question is - how would I go around learning about different design patterns and approaches to problem solving if I don’t know about their existence in the first place? Is it just a matter of proactive learning and I should know all of them in advance, as well as their uses?
Let’s for example say I need to create a system for inserting a large amount of data from files into the db, or you need to create some service with many scheduled tasks, or an user authentication system. Before you sit down and start developing those the way you usually do, what kind of steps could you take to learn a potentially better way of doing it?
Thanks for the book recommendation, I’ll definitely check it out! The course sounds really helpful as well, I imagine there are many remote classes like that nowdays or as part of learning sites like pluralsight so that might be worth checking out. If there’s one conclusion I got out of this thread so far is that it is pretty much something you have to learn and practice in advance and then hope to use appropriately, there’s no sure-way or easy way of finding a pattern once you’re already faced with a problem.