One cannot be successful as an architect without thinking of not only what to do, but how to get it done within an organization, which requires knowing why it should matter to someone who isn’t a technologist.

One of my favorite books, and one that changed how I think about software and the evolution of ideas, was A Pattern Language by Christopher Alexander (Oxford University Press).

In 1966, Derrida delivered a paper entitled “Structure Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (which is a wonderful paper, right up there with the original DynamoDB paper and the Page Rank algorithm paper).

I borrow from the world of philosophy, having studied and fallen in love with it in graduate school, and finding its rigors and explosive power very helpful in my 20-year career in tech.

There are two jobs in the world that people want to do the most while knowing the least about: architect and strategist.