[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.