Core competencies

Unfortunately for the health of this blog, the best lectures won't get the best blog posts because I'll be busy listening to them.

The Magic Seven core competencies for architects was, for me, greatly encouraging. (I'm trying to reassure K that the stuff I found exciting wasn't precisely the same stuff he objects to on principle.)

A lot of the Magic Seven, I already have.

I have at least a little bit of all of the different types of them.

Some of the things that separate architects from developers are the same sorts of things that cause me not to feel like a true developer sometimes. You mean there's a name for that?

Many of the competencies that I don't have, or need work in, I can think right now of very specific problems I'm having on my project that are caused or worsened by those very things (or the absence of them).

Finally, even supremely competent architects fail. In the middle of an ongoing epic fail, it's pretty much impossible to know whether the architect could have prevented the failure by successful deployment of core competencies, or whether the whole thing was doomed from the start, but one hopes to be able to learn something someday looking back. (Hopefully not looking back from the business end of an espresso machine, though.)