One of the things that has become really important to me since assuming a job that has "architect" in the title is the need to be legitimate. What I mean by that is I don't ever want to reach a point where I'm involved with designing software systems without actually understanding how to code and use the latest frameworks and tools. This is important now because I've never had a gig where I write this little code.
While it's hard to define exactly what my career path looks like going forward, it will either be something like the gig that I'm in, or managing developers and process. In either case, it involves assuming some amount of technical leadership. I think that the success of the team you work with is affected by how up to date you are. Stuff is changing constantly. No one wants to be told how things should be based on a what made sense a decade ago.
That's one of the reasons I still run my own sites, I have an open source project (actually, two now!), and I'm trying to do more speaking gigs. Being legit actually means building stuff. I have to credit one of the directors I had at Microsoft, who in his first meeting with us did a demo of some Silverlight app he ported to HTML/Javascript. Talk about instant credibility.
I jokingly tell the devs at work, "Those who can't, architect," but I'm mostly kidding. I never want them to think I don't know what's going on. That, and I don't want to actually not know what's going on!
So with that, I'd like to say that I wrote a few lines of code tonight.
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