A Day in The Life:
Senior Software Architect
What is your job about?
Typically my job is about supporting and enhancing our current products as well as delivering new products to the marketplace. As technology changes so fast I generally spend a portion of my time investigating new frameworks (such as Entity Framework or ASP.NET MVC) to try and understand how they would fit into our development environment and whether we should be using them to build products.
What does your typical day look like?
Generally my day is defined by the projects that we currently have running and whereabouts in the development lifecycle they are. At the moment we have a major product in test, which means that I spend an amount of my day debugging and fixing software, as well as liaising with the business giving status updates to management and acting as the interface for User Acceptance. As we also have another project in the inception phase I am doing technology evaluations and working with members of the business to tie down technical requirements and really understand what is needed.
What is the most challenging aspect of your job?
Managing change. The business changes very quickly and we have to be adaptable to that change. This may mean adapting existing software, or completely changing software that hasn't even been released yet to keep step with the business.
And the best part?
That's easy, releasing a new piece of software to the market. There is an immense feeling of satisfaction when you can take a project that you may have been involved with for over a year and deliver it to the marketplace.
What advice would you give to someone who's joining software development?
You need to be flexible and also realistic. There is only so much you can get done in a day and you always need to be prepared for the problem that will require all of your attention.
