Day 2 of Software Architecture 2012 & How an architect should be

This week I attended to Software Architecture 2012 conference from London. This was the second day of conference with 4 sessions per day on six tracks simultaneous. Here is the blog post of day one.
There were great sessions about how software design and architecture. I really enjoyed the keynote, where Simon Brown talked about how software architecture should be. One thing that he mentioned and I thing that is very important is what an architecture should do. I think that we know a lot of architecture that don’t write code anymore and don’t learn new technologies. They climb on the Ivory Tower and when we have a question throw a response like: “Implementation detail”. How you can define a solution when you don’t know the technology? Yep, that type of “guru” is only a PowerPoint architected and nothing more.

He is the perfect person that can draw components on a white paper and the first person that will run when a project will have problems. In that moment he will show the SAD (Software Architecture Documentation) but without giving you a real solution.
A pretty nice solution here (because you cannot be master of all technologies) is to let your ego at home and talk with technologies specialists. Design a good solution means making a team with this guys and with the rest of the developing team. They know the real problems that technologies have and what is the real limitation of a framework. On paper everything looks good.
As software architecture you should be able to share your knowledge, to couch and be mentor for other peoples. If you share your knowledge no one will come and steal your position. In reality, your value will increase because the team level will be higher and they will like working with you.
Don’t let people learn from their own experience. Try to share your experience with others, because we don’t want to reinvent the wheel again and again.

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Day 4