Sunday, February 22, 2015

Continuing Education for Architects

As fast as technology changes, members of the information technology field, no matter what role they fill (developer, architect, project manager, etc.), are effectively in a never-ending continuing education course.  It’s not a formal course and is entirely self-directed.  It doesn’t have formal grades, although your success in the field is effectively the grading system.  Some resist this concept and learn only under duress.  

I’ve received requests my readers in the past for additional recommendations on how to make their learning process for Java EE technologies more effective.  That’s an excellent question.  It’s also admirable as it means they are accepting responsibility for that learning process and are aggressively pursuing it.  

I’ll elaborate on some of the tactics I use to direct my own education; perhaps you might find some of those tactics useful as well. 

1.   Browse open source project source solving similar problems

Besides drawing on past experience, there are other ways.  There are very few new problems in IT these days.  Most of the design problems have already been solved with solutions published.  Given the extremely large number of open source projects with published source, chances are that several of them have solved a problem very close if not identical to yours.

I’ll provide an example.  For a micro-service I’m writing (here) in preparation for an upcoming presentation, I need to solve the problem of supporting SQL generation for multiple relational database types (e.g. Oracle, Microsoft SQL Server, PostgreSQL, MySql, and others).  While there is an ANSI standard for SQL, many database software platforms have idiosyncrasies in their syntax and differ from the standard.  In this case, Hibernate, the ORM product, generates SQL under the covers and supports multiple SQL dialects and I found that section of their source enlightening.

2.   Follow Thought Leaders for your topic on Twitter, Slideshare, and YouTube

You can get an early lead on future IT directions by receiving tweets and presentations from thought leaders on your topic.  Typically, tweets are brief, but you can follow it up with additional research if it appears interesting.

3.   Catalog important nuggets of information you receive.

If you’re like me, you can’t remember everything.  I catalog important nuggets of information I run into using the mind mapping software FreeMind.  It’s open source and free.  It’s essentially an outline on steroids.  You can insert hyperlinks, connect many disparate ideas, expand/collapse any portion of the map, and many other useful things.  A portion of a mind map I’m working on for micro-service architects is below.  



Gerald Weinberg calls this the “fieldstone method”.  He likens finding good nuggets of information to finding stones for a stone wall your constructing.  When you find the stone, you might not know how you’re going to use it (i.e. on which section of wall), but you keep it anyway and catalog it for future use.  Weinberg provides much more detail on this concept in his book.

4.   Contribute to LinkedIn Groups

The LinkedIn has a groups feature where members can post questions and contribute answers.  There are groups for just about any topic of interest.  Yes, there are plenty of useless posts, but you can get some valuable nuggets of information.  Also, it’s a decent test bed for ideas you have.  This is similar to striking up a conversation about a topic with a colleague, but on a much wider scale.

5.   Write Some Code

Pick an open source project of interest to you and contribute to it.  Yes - you should still do this even if you're an architect.  If you’re interested in a product that doesn’t exist yet, write it and post it on GitHub (or one of the other open source project hosting providers).

6.   Write Articles or Give Presentations

Understanding a topic to the point that you can explain it to others forces a level of education beyond the content of your article or presentation.  Also, many people in our field are not nice critics.  If your article gets attention and is crap, you’ll be told that in very short order.