An architect first needs to write for herself, and then for her team. Let me explain a bit.
An architect takes the trio of requirements, people, and environment, and does her research to design the most delightful system. In her research process, she uses her past experience as well as the experience of others. Even a moderately complex system design involves a lot of trade-offs without clear winners. For example, given that there are tens of different databases one can choose, how can she recommend a specific one? Only a clear mind can produce a logically sound write-up. So, in the process of writing and rewriting her design rationale, an architect can strengthen the soundness of her own logic behind the choices made. This is also known as covering one’s ass.
Secondly, an architect is a busy person and can’t scale her time if she has to personally explain her design rationale to everyone. In fact, as she’s designing the system and making certain assumptions, she must seek feedback from the team to help her find alternatives or blind-spots. Writing scales infinitely (e.g. J.K. Rowling), and after all, an architect must use a scalable system for herself, right?
In this episode, I have two all time great books to recommend, The Elements of Style and On Writing Well. If you want to learn to write with a fascinating biographic story, I loved On Writing (A Memoir of the Craft) by Stephen King. Do yourself a favor and get these books. Even if you are a native English speaker, I recommend you reading these books to make your writing interesting. As you can imagine, these books on writing are fun read, it’d be quite an irony otherwise.
As promised before, this is my last soft-skills related post in the software architecture series. Only a few senior engineers will break the glass ceiling and become an architect. Fewer will become a great architect. All the great ones I’ve met had exemplary soft-skills.