Skip to main content

Software Architecture as a Career

For this week’s post for software architecture, I decided to explore pursuing it as a career. I have focused several of my posts in this blog to going into a career for software architecture and quality assurance, but software development is very appealing to me as well.

Although I have found this class more difficult than the quality assurance class, I find the work we have done in this class very satisfying, and I would like to do something like this in my career.

I found an article from “Lifehacker,” where they interviewed a software architect Harrison Ambs on what it was like to be a software architect. It focused less on what a software architect is, and more gave general career advice for someone in the industry.

The final question in the interview said, “What advice would you give to those aspiring to join your profession?” He gave a paragraph with some good advice. (Starting with, “Always be willing to learn something even if you know you’ll be terrible at.”) However, I wish more of the article expanded on this and made this more of the focus of the interview.

In one of the answers, he said he worked around 45 hours a week. There were a lot of answers that were like this, and these sort of things are good to know for seeing what a career in the field would be. However, they were good to know, but these didn’t seem like the most important things that the article could be focusing on

I suppose they didn’t want to flood the article with jargon that someone who was outside the discipline or was just starting wouldn’t know, but I think they missed a great opportunity to inspire someone to become a great architect.

There was some good information in there, though. He said he is always learning from blogs and newsletters of “as many individual app developers as possible because these people are honed like a samurai blade when it comes to software development.”

That is good to follow through on as I am pursuing my craft. It is always good to be continuously learning and growing your skills and mindset. This is something that these blogs have made me start doing, and it is something that I would like to continue to develop.

https://lifehacker.com/career-spotlight-what-i-do-as-a-software-architect-1699203274

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Shailesh Rao on Quality Assurance

In this episode (number 219) of “Test Talks,” I was able to hear Shailesh Rao’s insight into having quality software. He compared it to a “paper-free office” or a “stress-free life,” both worthy goals, but are hard to achieve. They can be strived towards, but it is near impossible to get it 100%. He brought up the issues that bad software can pose to potentially millions of users. Bad software can open the doors to hackers, who might be able to take down websites like Twitter or Reddit. Also, it might stop airlines from being able to function — an annoyance to most, but Mr. Rao asked, “what if there was time-sensitive and lifesaving medicine onboard?” I found this podcast brought up some aspects that I had not thought of before when if comes to quality assurance. I suppose that I’ve thought about the various things he brought up, but as a consumer and never as a creator of the software. A very thought-provoking topic brought up was the fickleness of consumers. They don’t have the...

Testing: Like Destroying Sandcastles

https://joecolantonio.com/testtalks/223-testing-dream-journaling-smashing-sand-castles-with-noemi-ferrera/ In this blog for software quality assurance and testing, I decided to return to the “Test Talks” podcast, presented by Joe Colantonio, for another episode (#223). In it, he sat down with Noemi Ferrera, a software tester for a Chinese mobile gaming company to get her take on the subject. Noemi gave a few interesting metaphors that I appreciated for how to look at testing. In one, she gave the example of going to a movie where you had already read the book. It was different than how you imagined it while reading it, and testing is a way of making the “movie version” fit the way you envisioned it playing out.  The other metaphor for testing that she gave was, if you were children at the beach, the developers would be the ones building the sandcastles, whereas the testers would be the ones destroying them. I don’t know if that would be the most accurate way of lookin...

Decorator Design Pattern

For this week's blog on Software Design, I decided to watch a short tutorial on one of the design patterns I didn't pick for a previous assignment. I picked Proxy Design pattern to cover before, and now I'm going back to learn about Decorator Design Pattern. It is only a thirteen minute video, so I won't be going as deep as I would had I picked it for the assignment. I am also going to talk about my reflections on it rather than create a tutorial, so I am not going to reteach it to the person reading this blog post. The tutorial I chose was made by Derek Banas on YouTube. He used an example of a pizza parlor to illustrate the wrong way to code it by using inheritance. He shows the problem with this because you would have to create a very large number of subclasses for all your objects (in this case pizzas). Composition, on the other hand, is a dynamic way of modifying objects. Instead of creating as many subclasses, you add functionality at run time. It has th...