I used to be very interested in Software Architecture, in fact I've read many of the papers cited here.
When I did a startup many years ago, I committed the mistake of paying too much attention to the architecture of the software [1] I was writing, and not enough attention to the product/customer side of it.
The last couple of years I've been de-emphasizing software architecture as an interest, and have been paying much more attention to how product teams build successful products, what the patterns are, etc. I was lucky enough to work at Facebook for a while and got to see (and learn) a very successful working model of product development.
So, while I'm not saying that software architecture is not important (it is), also pay attention to the product/customer side: what choices (software, organizational, hiring, business) allow you to move fast and iterate, to release early and often, to run A/B tests, etc.
I think good software engineers are just as much product guys (and data guys) as they are software guys.
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[1] https://github.com/scalien/scaliendb
When I did a startup many years ago, I committed the mistake of paying too much attention to the architecture of the software [1] I was writing, and not enough attention to the product/customer side of it.
The last couple of years I've been de-emphasizing software architecture as an interest, and have been paying much more attention to how product teams build successful products, what the patterns are, etc. I was lucky enough to work at Facebook for a while and got to see (and learn) a very successful working model of product development.
So, while I'm not saying that software architecture is not important (it is), also pay attention to the product/customer side: what choices (software, organizational, hiring, business) allow you to move fast and iterate, to release early and often, to run A/B tests, etc.
I think good software engineers are just as much product guys (and data guys) as they are software guys.
-
[1] https://github.com/scalien/scaliendb