I finished the udemy course “How to Become An Outstanding Solution Architect” in October 2023. I’d rate this course a 3/5.
This course’s goal is to teach “all the soft and hard skills you need to take your architect design skills to the next level.” Does it do that? Well, for the right audience, a little bit.
The course distills a lot of information into manageable chunks and sound bites. The information is high level enough to meet its ambitious goals on the surface but lacks substance in details. A lot of the information felt empty – the course was a series of slides with information. No personal anecdotes or stories or other value-adding “sugar” I expect great courses to have was included.
This course is part of udemy’s Personal Plan for Software Architects and takes about 7 hours to complete. The course covers a good breadth of knowledge and would be a great overview for software engineers in their early/mid career. For more senior engineers, this is useful as only as a refresher on concepts, but otherwise not recommended.
My favorite part of taking this course was how much it reminded me how much I didn’t realize I knew.
Pros:
- Decent summary of the software architect role. Despite some of my complaints, the course did achieve it’s goal of covering the soft and technical skills a software architect is expected to have.
- The soft skills overview was my favorite part of the course. It alluded to the likelihood that software architects will be exposed to more company politics and will need more than just technical skills to be successful.
- Most of my notes are from the soft skills part. The breakdown of the 3 different types of power (implicit, granted, and personal) did help organize my thoughts on some political issues I’ve come across in my career.
- Recommended for someone early/mid career as a starting point, especially if they plan to work with Microsoft technologies.
Cons:
- My biggest complaint was that he content felt stodgy and outdated.
- The assumptions about a company’s org structure and how an architect fits in was presented as absolute common fact instead one option out of a several; very “big enterprise company.”
- The list of common architectural solutions felt copy pasted out of a college book I had in 2007 and focused a lot of layered architecture. It did not mention a lot of newer architectural patterns/challenges such as hexagonal, distributed or event based.
- The course is tailored to users of Visual Studio code and Microsoft technologies/tooling. The instructor, Mark Farragher, is a Microsoft Certified Trainer. As someone who does not develop with Microsoft tools or languages, I felt a lot of the information presented was irrelevant.
- And entire section was dedicated to how to generate code from UML in Visual Studio 2017 and I could not have cared less.
- A lot on the ‘how to design an architecture’ and ‘choosing the right patterns’ assumed a lot on greenfield systems. No enough time was spent on how to architect within legacy systems.
- Dry. It was like a book of checklists was being read to me. The lack of interactivity is expected for udemy courses, but the instructor was not a value add. He could have easily been replaced by an AI reading a script.
In summary, the course provides a valuable introduction to software architecture but falls short in terms of modernity and relevance to those outside the Microsoft ecosystem. It’s a decent starting point for aspiring architects, particularly those early in their careers. However, it lacks the depth and engaging content that could make it a more comprehensive learning experience.
Final Reflection
I should avoid these broader ‘overview’ courses as what I seem to desire is deeper knowledge and details.
I should look into the instructor a bit more before decided to take a course.
I should take courses more to my skill level.