As a developer you have a lot of opinions; tabs or spaces, Angular or React, Visual Studio or Jetbrains Rider, ... Your personal preferences have a large impact on your productivity and help you be the great developer that you are.
But if you ever take the step to become an architect, you need to get rid of all your opinions and start with something I call ‘architectural thinking’.
It means starting from the facts, understanding the characteristics of every option and being able to effectively analyze the trade-offs. It means removing subjectivity from the equation, no more ‘I think that GraphQL is better than REST’. Instead compare the pro’s and con’s of every solution and use that as the basis of your design decisions. (And of course don’t forget to document them using an ADR).
There is no such thing as a silver bullet.
If you don’t start applying tradeoff analysis a trap that I have fallen in myself is that you become an evangelist for certain technologies. You start to focus too much on a certain approach, disregarding the bad parts and over-amplifying the good parts. No more room for nuanced decisions with clear trade-offs applicable in a certain context.
One way I try to avoid falling into this trap is by always creating multiple possible solution designs. If I end up with only one possible solution I didn’t think hard enough and move back to the drawing board.
Remark: This is something you can also apply when doing domain modelling, there are multiple possible domain models you can come up with to solve a particular problem. All with their own pro’s and cons.
All models are wrong, but some are useful.