There is no one thing superior to the other. ‘Forms’ and ‘content’ are both important in their own rights. Taekwando is about ‘form’, ‘content’ takes a backseat.Īt this point, I think most readers can guess where this is leading to. You are expected to learn it by heart and perform these forms verbatim during your exam. A Taekwondo ‘form’ consists of a set of fixed punches and kicks and is designed to test the student’s ability to learn new techniques and memorise choreographed strikes. I remember fondly taking belt exams where I had to perform a ‘form’ in front of the instructors and other students. Tawanchai PK Saenchai, a recent favourite Thai boxer of mineĬompared with Taekwondo, another martial art I did when I was very young, is the complete opposite of Muay Thai. Muay Thai is all about ‘content’, ‘form’ always takes a second priority. There are no rules that say you can’t do two left kicks in succession, only tradeoffs. Muay Thai is also known as the science of eight limbs - punches, kicks, knees, elbows, one of each on each side-you are free to combine whatever you learnt in your combos during spars and fights. In Muay Thai, there are no fixed ‘forms’. I do Muay Thai once a week purely for its health benefits and its tremendous efficiency as a sport.

I am what most people would call a weekend warrior because I don’t train to fight. Perhaps it can be better explained using a metaphor-I play Muay Thai. Ask ourselves, if architecture is indeed the ‘form’ in contrast to the ‘content’, does it really make sense to design software that has form but not content? I think it is quite obvious the answer is no. Now let’s take off our engineering hats and put on our architect hats. Why is engineering important to a software architect It also helps development teams by removing siloed knowledge and training engineers to have a holistic mindset of the complete technical solution. That is why I strongly urge software engineers to have a voice in software architecture if your organisation insists on separating the two. People also rarely talk about delivering good ergonomics or user experience to engineers, because most would think these ‘big words’ are only aimed at non-technical end users, but having good architecture is akin to giving the engineer the best ergonomics for the engineer to succeed, making everyone’s job easier, wouldn’t you agree? Having repeatable patterns in place usually results in safer code because engineers can then direct more of their attention to the business domain and the functional correctness of their code instead of constantly worrying about architectural concerns, which usually are cross-cutting and permeate throughout the codebase.Īlthough the words architecture and maintainability are subjective in nature, the presence of deliberate and thoughtful architecture within a piece of software should guide engineers into falling into the pit of success, meaning the most obvious and straightforward way of engineering is already, by default, the architecturally most optimal way. Studies have shown that humans are excellent at recognising patterns and having patterns lowers the cognitive complexity of comprehending its contents. Having sensible architecture, whether it is decided by architects or collectively by fellow engineers, helps with maintainability, which in turn lets engineers write code more easily.Īrchitecture gives software ‘ forms/patterns’, whereas code gives software its ‘ contents’.

Their main responsibility is writing code, ideally bug-free, correct code. I tend to think of software engineers as ‘having their feet on the ground’. Where software engineering and architecture meet Why is architecture important to a software engineer But many companies seem to think otherwise. Software engineering and software architecture should be considered two sides of the same coin. To rephrase what the expectations towards a software architect are,Īre software architects expected to master the programming languages that they are designing systems for? Of course, it would be impossible for anyone to know every existing technology inside out. Other Google search results also show similarly how architects are expected to have a certain level of technical knowledge. Let’s review the soft skills and the hard skills needed. They also have to have the soft skills to manage projects and people. However, technical knowledge isn’t enough. To be effective, a software architect needs broad (and deep) technical knowledge to make good decisions. This might include tools, software coding standards, or platforms to be used. A quick Google search gives me this as the first result:Ī software architect makes high-level design choices and frames technical standards. Let’s take a step back and try to understand what a software architect is supposed to do.

Software design architect