Found this excellent keynote talk yesterday by Venkat Subramaniam titled "Qualities of a Highly Effective Architect" that covers the subject extremely well. The same criteria also apply to any developer - not just those shooting for architect position of some sort.
Very rarely does this sort of inspirational type of speech manage to have so insightful content as well.
Some highlights and quotes I found particularly refreshing and insightful (or just fun):
- Be a mentor, not a tormentor
- Architecting is evaluating tradeoffs
- Nurturing knowledge and good attitude is your professional responsibility
- Worst thing for company is for someone to say "I know this so this is how we do it"
- Must be able to talk about both sides of the issue, not just go "this is awesome" or "this sucks"
- Guide, don't dictate
- "Two sets of people scare me: those who can't follow instructions and those who can only follow instructions"
- "Funny how some ideas go from brilliant to stupid within minutes of prototyping"
- Prototypes beat any argument
- Diversify your knowledge portfolio - learn entirely new things all the time, something that you're uncomfortable learning - that's when it's something actually new. Comfort is the enemy
- Learning happens in deltas - the more entirely different things you've learned previously the faster you can learn something new / evaluate new concepts and ideas
- Lead by example - the worst kind of architect is the power point architect. Architect must be able to code. A good architect practices what they preach. Avoid being a powerpoint architect
- Every technical decision should have an expiration label
- Evolve the architecture - confidence in architecture should always be communicated as a probability - and the confidence should grow with the knowledge of the application
- New tech / migration: first poc, then the hardest problem then the following large mass comes easy
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