Ask HN: Software Engineer to Technical Architect
How can a Software Engineer (Web developer) move into the role of a Technical Architect. Would like to hear from those of you who took this path.
You may also need to know about the various virtualization technology and which one would be better depending on if you need the system to be private, internet facing or both (VMWare, Citrix, KVM, Hyper-V, etc.). You will also need to understand TCP/IP, UDP and the associated networking terminology and equipment available, as you normally also need to know about switching and routing, storage arrays, storage systems, hard drive and SSD types and the pros and cons of them.
As ultimately you would be the person to design an entire system with security, scalability, confidentiality, availability and integrity in mind and be able to break up the work into tasking and plans for the organization. Normally a title like this is reserved for those creating large systems due to the vast amount of experience that is required. An example would be a technical architect to build a nation wide fully automated and redundant web hosting platform for hosting the top government websites with the requirement of the sites never being down and never loosing data.
This means you will need to learn how to build highly secure and robust automated build systems for code and infrastructure. This way if you loose a system you can auto schedule the purchase and installation of new hardware or spin up a new virtual machine without having to do this manually.
Best job to get you started is a job as a network or systems administrator. I would recommend starting with a small business that hosts a few websites, then move up to larger businesses. If you want the ultimate challenge I would recommend working for a government agency that hosts thousands of high profile sites that cannot be unavailable and require 100% uptime.
You could do all of these things internally but you will not get the real life business environment people to people experience. As it is hard to make estimates on tasks you have never done before or worked with experienced people that do those tasks on a regular basis. You do not have to master all of these things but you should have done many of them with your own hands in a full-time job at some point.
Base requirement is being in a senior level position in the IT and security field, since it does require a nice bit of years of experience of hands on work and project management experience to be good at the job.