Learn and experiment: Self

- [Instructor] You as an architect have responsibilities to work with different groups of people. On the one hand, you'll work with the engineers and their questions and concerns. And on the other hand, you'll have responsibility to management, to communicate and help drive the decisions that management needs. But there's more to the architects day than meeting and design decisions. There is a personal aspect to your day as an architect as well. Over the next few videos, we'll take a look at a typical day in the life of two different architects. These two architects have similar jobs, but they have unique challenges and responsibilities. We'll look at the difference in problems, in actions and the difference in how they respond as architects. We'll see common themes in the day to day job of architects, and how their jobs vary based on needs and responsibilities. Anna is our first architect. Today, Anna comes to work and she has a full day of work ahead of her. She easily becomes engrossed in her team in helping her team solve immediate problems. Anna also realizes that she needs to force herself some time to step back and spend time learning and growing her own architectural skills. So she can apply these in new and modern techniques and technologies to help her project and her team. Anna does this by taking time to write software that is never going to be used in the application in order to try out new ideas. This is valuable time spent, as it gives her knowledge and experience and new tools and techniques that may be helpful for her team in the future. For instance, she can write a new auto scaling algorithm and see how it performs. Or she can experiment with machine learning to see what it's capable of doing so she can think about how that technology might be useful in the applications that she owns. She contributes her newly acquired experiences, in papers, in talks and contributions to open source software. Anton is our other architect. Anton has similar responsibilities and challenges, as Anna does. Anton dedicates time every week to reading and learning. He does this by studying new software techniques and processes that are coming out. He studies what peers and other companies do, and he thinks about whether these ideas might work in his company. He's reading about best practices. He's attending conferences. He's growing his network with fellow architects. His goal is to keep growing his architectural skills, and as such become a better architect over time. Both Anna and Anton are solid architects. They know they must spend time growing their own knowledge and experience in order to make better and better decisions about the architecture of their own applications. They know they're responsible for taking their newly acquired knowledge in creating procedures and policies for their teams to utilize. They know their decisions about new technologies, which to use and which not to use will influence the course and direction of their entire application development team, and the tools and techniques they know and utilize. This is why it is important for both Anna and Anton to take time for self growth and self learning. Because the things they learn, the new tools they discover, the new techniques they see will help them make better decisions for their respective teams and make better application architectures as well.