We have lived through the experience of graduating from "member of technical staff" developers to becoming practicing software architects at the most senior levels of respective companies. We are technical people, not managers, and we enjoy the technical nature of our work.
We enjoy parity of salary and benefits with the senior managers at respective firms. In other words, we are none-the-worse-for-wear as a consequence of choosing a software architecture career.
Software architecture is an emerging discipline and an exciting career path for software professionals. It is relatively new. You may have noticed that most software books today do not say much about software architecture. It is not taught in educational institutions.
It is confused with software engineering (typically by people who have remote relationships to software architecture per se in their hard attempts to find out what is the software architecture is).
We choose the pseudo-military style, because it embodies an essential attitude. As a software architect, you need many survival skills - some technical, some political, some personal. While neither of us has military experience, we have seen software architecture become battleground in many ways. It is a battleground of ideas, as developers compete to forward their own concepts. It is a battleground for control of key design decisions that may be overruled by managers or developers, perhaps covertly. It is a battleground with many risks, since architects are responsible for a much wider range of technical and process risks than most managers or individual developers.
Introduction to Campground
Software Architecture is everything - from design patterns to prototyping, business case development to leadership.
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Basic Training
In the military, basic training is used to challenge and motivate cadets and to demonstrate both the demands and rewards of a military career.
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Drill School
The architect must serve as the technical role model to team members and maintain their respect on technical issues in order to effectively guide
the project toward the desired technical goals.
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Jump School
Without adequate intelligence, in software, when the architect joins an organization or project team without adequate intelligence information,
there is no telling what they are getting into.
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Leadership Training
There are some definite benefits to being a soldier - having a well-defined role which is important and vital to
the success of great enterprises, the camaraderie of fellow soldiers, and the belief that if
everyone performs as well as you, victory will soon be at hand.
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Going to War
In order to go to war, you need to commit to a new mindset and a ruthless pursuit of architectural knowledge.
This is a substantial paradigm shift from thinking like an individual software developer writing one program.
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Psychological Warfare
In psychological warfare, we use the term grounding to mean a state of quietconfidence. Grounding comes from knowing "how things happen."
And usually, you gain knowledge of how things happen through experience, including making mistakes, trial, and error.
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Intelligence Operations
Coming soon...
To be updated...