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I'm Paul Downey, I'm a technical architect here at GDS. I'm a developer who gets sent
to a lot of meetings. The role of a technical architect changes as the project goes through
our phases of discovery, alpha, beta, live. During discovery, you're thinking about the
shape of the project and what you might build, what will tell the most powerful story. And
during alpha, you're sort of thinking ahead, you're thinking about how you're going to
make that real. So the team will be building something and it's like how do you actually
make that into a situation where you can put it in front of real users using real data.
And then when you're during beta you're thinking about how you're making this live, to go live
is an act of switching the old system off, so you're thinking more about the old systems
than you are about the new systems necessarily. We like our technical architects to be able
to code, you know, they have to be able to talk to developers and work alongside them.
They also have to go to meetings and talk to people who don't necessarily understand
some of the language that developers will use. Hire someone who you think's going to
get on with other people, who's not just a techno nerd. You need some kudos or credibility,
I'm not saying I have that all the time, but somebody who's going to convince people because
quite often you're asking them to make decisions their not going to be comfortable with. Something
you might not expect is that we're not obsessing about technology, we're also thinking about
the people and the team, are they working well, also how are they growing as individuals.
We may point them at areas which we spot as being useful elsewhere, so there's a maturity
model that goes from working on a project, to working on a product, to working on a platform,
and the job of a technical architect is to spot that evolution. I think you need to be
a little bit longer in the tooth than a new developer; that's only to say that you've
seen a few more things, you can sense what's going to happen next. Most of the time you're
having to think about things which aren't just delivering, which is where a lot of people
find the fun, so as you get older you think about something that might go wrong, things
which might go well and just try and shape the team to work in that way.