New title…

…slightly different job.  Rather than just being a Software Development Engineer, I’m a Software Development Engineer – B2B lead!  Basically this means that I’ll be taking an ownership stake in the B2B processes and hopefully work my way into being a subject matter expert.  While it probably means that actual development time will go down, I hope that architecture type activities will go up.  My understanding is that I will be working with people inside the company to understand our client’s B2B needs, educate the company as to our capabilities, as well as helping with actual implementations.  My hope is that as I get a better feel for the B2B activities, I will be able to help set development direction with regards to B2B solutions.

With that in mind I have a couple of goals in mind as I try to ramp up.  I’ll see how well they fit into making me a better software architect.  They are in no particular order:

• Get/create a central place for people in the organization to come to for B2B information
• Discover and catalog the current systems that I will be supporting
• Discover scope of new projects – also catalog those
• Meet with the different audiences to get/set expectations
• Determine a small set of metrics for those audiences
• Document definitions!

So there may very well be more posts related to moving documents between companies in the future.  Not that I’ve been seriously prolific in the past.

Well maybe not backwards…

I had a rather terse post earlier about my career moving backwards.  That is how it seemed at the time, but often if one door is closed, another opens.  I will soon be doing a similar job, but with a different focus.  Hopefully this be a step along the architect path.  I’ll add more detail once it becomes official.

First solution architecture steps

I’ve been working with business to business area at work for a couple of years, pretty much by accident, but it has been pretty interesting. I started out modifying the ASP pages that essentially made up the system, dealing with the CXML ecommerce standard. About a year ago I made an attempt to convert that to .NET when we needed to add XCBL support for one of our clients. As I built this implementation I did some things to make it a bit more object oriented, but my main goal was to get the code base into .NET and support the new standard rather than to re-do how the code was architected.

Fast forward to today and we are beginning to actually re-architect how our B2B is done. We’ve spent the last couple of days trying to understand what we do currently and what the business is trying to accomplish and some of the ways we can accomodate that. It’s been pretty cool, though the group of us is rather inexperienced with the actual building of architecture, though we have someone on the team with that type of experience who is trying to guide us.

I’m definitely interested in this because it’s where I would like to go in the future. Of course one of my first questions when doing this is that we can’t be the first ones. I realize I am not going to get the code, and quite frankly wouldn’t want that, but I would have thought there would be some patterns available that could somewhat guide us. It realistically is probably my inexperience with what to even look for that is probably the real issue. We’ll see what happens.

What kind of architect?

A little over a week ago I posted a note to the IASA Yahoo group asking about how to start moving into software architecture. In answer to my question, Chris Sterling (I know he’s got another blog, but darned if I could find a link) gave me another question along with some definitions:

I would like to ask if you are interested in application architecture, infrastructure architecture, or enterprise architecture most of all? Application architects tend to be more focused on good design at the application and model levels. Infrastructure architects tend to be working on the hardware and systems side of organizations. Enterprise architects tend to be more involved in business vision and applicability to technology implementations in an organization. These are all over simplifications and most of us do not sit directly at any of these particular areas but usually somewhere in between. We just have a tendency towards 1 or 2 of them more than the others.

In a reprise of my answer I have to say I’m definitely interested in Enterprise Architecture. Helping businesses use technology to be able to accomplish their goals is appealing to me on many levels. However, I understand that that is a big chunk to bite off, so I want to focus first on Application Architecture, using that as a spring board to the enterprise stuff. Really the question for me is where to start. What if any guidance is available? What do I need to understand? What do I do to prove I know what I know? Hopefully the IASA will be a great place for this. Regardless the learning should be interesting.

From developer to architect

With my career based on Microsoft languages, I’ve been aware of and sort of active in user groups such as the old VB user group and .Net user groups in the Puget Sound area. While they showed new and future features in the tools and the languages, they never really got into how I could improve myself as a software developer. About a year ago I came across another one, the International Association of Software Architects (Puget Sound Chapter). It claimed to be vendor agnostic and was touted more as a “professional organization” than the user groups. Since there was no cost, I joined and went to a meeting. I’ll have to admit I was impressed. Charlie Poole of NUnit fame did a presentation to the group and there was cool discussion.

However, after that school and life took over and while I kept rough track of what was happening, I didn’t go to any more meetings until this past week. It was quite interesting as there was discussion about scrum and we broke into groups to discuss a couple different topics. The group I was in discussed how architects should interact with the teams they are involved with. Even though it was interesting, it was definitely clear that I was a junior to all the people in the room. To me though, it seems this is something the group would be great in addressing; how to bring along new architects. You know help build that group knowledge. Like stone masons and carpenters. So I posted the following to the group message board:

Hi Everyone,
I really enjoyed the meeting last week. It was great hearing the
discussion about how software architects can be a part of their
organizations. However, even though I’ve been doing development work for several years, it was quite obvious that my knowledge of software architecture and the various methodologies is severely lacking. I saw the earlier post about what people would be looking for when hiring an architect, but a lot of that was a foreign language. I realize there probably isn’t a twelve step program, but my question then is how do I go about gaining the skills that can move me from programmer to architect?

I’m very curious to see how this plays out because this is something I’m definitely interested in pursuing. Learning more about this whole thing certainly won’t hurt my career!