Once an architect, always an architect?

Thu, 29 Nov 2007 14:34:15 GMT

I'm currently on holiday. It's not much of a holiday admittedly, as it's doing development work. I thought I'd try "going back" to development for a bit as the project sounded interesting and it would give me a chance to experience being downstream of the architecture.

My expectations have been slightly confounded by the experience; people still treat me like an architect:

fundamental decisions are still left to me
I have to QA other team's work
I remain a technical authority on other projects by virtue of my proximity rather than my ongoing involvement!

And I guess this makes sense - how I view my own role on a project may not correlate with how other people view my role. Titles mean very little in a cross-functional team.

So I suppose what I'm really experiencing is what it's like being downstream of no architecture. It's made me realise how dependent some projects are on architecture or, at least, an architect. It doesn't necessarily take a lot of architecture, or that much of an architect, but it is required nonetheless.

The non-coding architect

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 19:14:00 GMT

I found a great blog entry today by Frank Kelly called How to spot the dreaded non-coding architect (NCA), which is about some of the differences between architects that can code and architects that can't (or don't). Since this site is about "coding the architecture", I thought you might find it interesting too.

These NCA folks can be really quite dangerous and give dev teams a bad name ... But how can you spot one? For most developers it's pretty easy but just in case you can't I've compiled a list of example scenarios that should help - comparing the often dogmatic attitude of the NCA with the pragmatism of the experienced Coding Architect (CA).

Recommended reading and a little humour to brighten up your Monday.

Coding the Architecture - development tag

Once an architect, always an architect?

The non-coding architect