What Do I Do?

I am primarily interested in Application Architecture positions. Over the past couple of years, my time has been split between the software development side and the design/architecture side. But I think that, going forward, I would prefer to concentrate more on the architecture side. This is where my 15 years of software development experience can be most effectively applied.

I have almost always been involved in design and architecture during my career. Even in my first job with Petro-Canada in 1993, I designed and architected a complex multi-server distributed application. Of course, I did everything on that project from building the servers themselves (they were shipped to me in pieces, I put them together, and shipped them to the distributed locations), to installing the OS/DB software, to writing the code, to travelling to the remote site for the actual install. That was a cool project, and still remains a personal highlight of my career.

And I believe on every project from that day til today, I have had a varying amount of design influence. Even on projects that had dedicated information and database architects, you don't even approach them without some idea of how you want the database or business objects to look. More often than not, they accepted my ideas without major modifications.

Don't get me wrong though. I'm not the type of person that sits around "architecting" all day while others do the coding. I am totally immersed in .NET, able to code in both C# and VB.NET. When presented with a problem, I will often whip up a "one time use" program to generate the answer for me. I don't expect that part of me to change. I will always want to have a hand in the code, even if it's just as a reviewer or mentor. And when a particularly tough bug is stumping a developer, I will be there in a heartbeat to help decipher and fix.

But software architecture is my specialty, and so that's where I think I will be most useful to any organization.