Pooya's place (in the Gulf) : aspiring architects

Architecture Thursdays webcasts for aspiring architects (May 24th)

pooyad — Thu, 26 Apr 2007 19:08:00 GMT

A well respected colleague of mine is working on a series of webcasts for aspiring architects, this should prove to be an incredibly valuable series especially for everyone who is a part of GulfSkyscrapers.

I'll be attending and I invite all of you to join me. We're planning on hosting this at Microsoft Offices with pizza for everyone and some great discussions afterwards. Hope to see you there. Register at the links below:

There will be a series of 4 webcasts on consecutive Thursdays covering the following topics:

Architecture 101 (Mohammad, May 24)

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032338971&culture=en-CA

Software development lifecycle and methodologies (Dave, May 31)

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032338974&culture=en-CA

Services orientation and other architectural paradigms (Dave, June 7)

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032338978&culture=en-CA

Transitioning from a developer to an architect (Mohammad, June 14)

http://msevents.microsoft.com/cui/eventdetail.aspx?EventID=1032338980&culture=en-CA

(Beta) Launch of Gulf Skyscrapers

pooyad — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 15:41:00 GMT

As I have mentioned previously on this blog, I'm looking to build an architect community in the Gulf region. After many discussions with architects in the community we are preparing for our (beta) launch of the Gulf Skyscrapers community at GITEX.

http://www.gulfskyscrapers.com/

See the site for the details, and join us live at GITEX on November 21st, 3:30pm near the Microsoft stand.

Architecture is Magic!

pooyad — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 15:56:00 GMT

That seemed to be consensus of some very long discussions with Udi. In essence, I'd like to have a way to make architecture more concrete, have a roadmap for how someone can become an architect, have some way to rate how good architects are, and make our profession more understandable for others and was looking for ideas on how to do this.

I know this is hard (maybe impossible), but I think it's part of our responsibility as architects to groom the next generation and try to make our profession easier to grasp and aspire to. We talked about so many subjects at length and at the end that was the only thing we could agree on. I think this reinforces some of my thoughts that a large part of the skills needed to be a successful architect is problem solving. This particular set of problems happen to be in the field of IT and around software and infrastructure design, but the general problem solving skills are still what seperate the good architects from the bad ones. Obviously technical knowledge is a fundamental requirement but being able to apply the wide array of technical knowledge to a specific problem is the key.

I'll have a lot more to say on this subject in future posts, but for now I'm trying to do my part by encouraging the architect community in the Gulf to get together in a forum and have these kinds of discussions. I think the more smart people we have dreaming up ideas on how to do this the better we'll be able to make progress on this problem for our whole profession.