[redact207]

I've been a dev for about as long as you were and keep flirting with the idea of moving into a dedicated SA space. How do you feel about the current trend towards togaf and ITIL? Are the useful, useless, good to cherry pick?

Also did you enjoy your last 20 yrs as a SA compared to if you stayed in some type of development? I'm quite interested in your back story as there's not a lot of seasoned SAs where I live.

[FourthProtocol]

Both TOGAF and ITIL certifications are a great way to land a job as an architect, but (especially true in the civil service) these documents often become the deliverable, project outcome be damned.

Just getting certified will alter your thinking in a good way though. It shows you in what kind of environment and how many large enterprises work, and there's use in that.

Yes I enjoyed it. You need to keep yourself honest though. Once async/await came along I doggedly stuck to message queues because it's what I knew. And then I wrote an app using async/await and felt like a fool. It can be humbling.

And I stay in development by writing a lot of code at home, sometimes at work to demonstrate a thing. An SA who doesn't maintain dev skills is not as effective as one that does.

I moved into EA about 5 years ago, and my next move would've been CTO, except that I resigend last year to write software I hope to make a living from. I'm lucky in that I managed to sell a solution I developed about 12 years ago for myself to an enterprise for enough money to not have to work for the next 10 years at least.

I like like architecture/design, and perpetually live in the persuit of perfect technical documention (what I wrote 10 years ago and thought of as good was... terrible), so of course I'd recommend it.