Intent of this Blog

Over the last 3 or so years, especially after the pandemic began, I get a lot of queries from my LinkedIn connections as well as fellow junior colleagues about shaping their careers within the context of being a mainframe application developer or a senior developer.

They look to me for some guidance as I have, over a couple of decades of my software career, had gone through different changes, challenges, and transformations. This triggered my idea to write a blog to address these repeated (yet very essential) questions. 

I Intend to initially answer in each of my blog posts to answer questions like:

1. What is (qualifies as) mainframe modernization?

2. What to learn for mainframe modernization?

3. How to divert my career into mainframe modernization?

4. What skills to develop to become an architect?

5. What technologies should I learn?

6. What resources are available for learning?

7. Should I do cloud certification? Which one to choose?

8. Do I need to learn DevOps?

9. Is Infrastructure knowledge necessary?

        10. Do I have career growth if I continue in mainframe projects?

Please feel free to use the comments section to add any other questions you also want to answer so that I can take them as my subsequent posts. My idea here is not to give career guidance but to give as much information as I can so that you can make decisions for yourself.

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What skills to develop to become an architect?

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The answer to this question as any seasoned architect will give you is "it depends". I can confirm that it's not cliché but reality. There are several types of "architects" in the market each having their own value, purpose and need. They may be Technology specific architects, Enterprise Architect, Business Domain architects, Lifecycle specific architects, Data Architect, Infrastructure architects, etc. to name a few. According to me, some key qualities that an architect would need are: Be the most adaptable and flexible person who can churn out solutions and alternatives within a given scope and constraints.  Be the first to break any bad news about things that may not work (technically) with reasoning.  Provide inputs to the organization's academy or learning department to add new skill courses needed by the employees for progress. In short, give information & indications to decision-makers on architecture and t...
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