2023: Personal Reflections

The year 2023 is ending and it's time to shortly reflect a bit on what has happened during the year.

Growing as a software architect

My role changed in the middle of the year, and I started acting as a Tribe Lead Architect. The Tribe Lead Architect role is a fairly new position in our company which has meant that there were things and practicalities to clarify, formula, and agree on. Like other roles, the role also adjusts based on personal interests. Practically, the new role has meant especially working with the architecture vision & strategy and contributing more to the road map work of the Tribe. The mix of strategic and operational work has been interesting and educative.

An important part of my work is to be an advisor in architectural matters in the Tribe. Practically being a coach who supports and engages teams in architecture design work. Besides that, I have been working to unify and manage the technology landscape, fostering collaboration of developers, creating guidance, and unified practices, especially among e.g. Architecture, Azure, Infrastructure as a Code, and DevOps. Most of my blog post reflects quite well on topics that are currently cooking at work.

Collaboration culture and knowledge-sharing

An essential part of the role has been actively working with fellow architects/developers, Tribe leadership, and stakeholders and constantly trying to be aware of what's happening elsewhere in the company. Being aware of important initiatives, strategies, and projects is sometimes challenging.

I would say that networking inside the company is a necessity to succeed in this role. The recently established Tribe Lead Architect Guild, IT Tech sessions, Architecture-sharing, 1to1 discussions, and Tribe Tech Community meetings have been very useful forums for exchanging experiences, and knowledge, and learning from others. Besides these one highlight of the year was the internal Architecture Summit conference in October where all architects gathered.

This year I have learned and gained a lot of expertise especially when comes to roadmap, selling and promoting your ideas, application life-cycle management, event-driven architecture, utilizing architecture decision records, understanding more about data mesh architecture, data products, and capabilities of the Data Bricks.

One new and existing experience for me was in September when I had a presentation about the Azure Developer CLI at one local Azure meetup. If you're interested, you can download the presentation from here.

Book Club

We started a book club at the beginning of the year with fellow architects in our chapter/team. Practically, we read a book at the same pace and discuss it together after one or two chapters.

During the year we have now read together two architecture-related books: The Software Architect Elevator: Redefining the Architect's Role in the Digital Enterprise by Hohpe, Gregor, and Fundamentals of Software Architecture: An Engineering Approach by Richards, Mark; Ford, Neal.

I have gained a lot from these books and especially from our discussions. It was a pleasure to hear different views and angles about topics and hear stories and experiences about real projects. I wrote a blog post earlier this year about deferring architecture decisions which has some personal reflection from one old project where I was involved. I got the inspiration for this blog post from The Software Architect Elevator book.

The next book in the row is The Unicorn Project: A Novel about Developers, Digital Disruption, and Thriving in the Age of Data by Kim, Gene. I looking for to continuing book clubbing this next year.

Cutting-edge technologies in projects

It has been a privilege to be involved in and see many cool projects that use the latest Azure Cloud, Data, IAM, API, and .NET technologies.

One highlight has been to start working on a new project using .NET Aspire technology and Azure Containers Apps Environment. Using the evolving technology is always a challenge but also a possibility to learn and share learnings and practices with others.

Thank you for reading!