Building Careers and Companies with Open Source with Miguel de Icaza

In this episode, David Fowler, the Partner Architect for the ASP.NET team walks you through landing his first job, moving from a dev to an architect role and what he had to learn and let go of at every step along the path. (David intros himself as a Principal Architect but his promotion was announced right after we filmed.)
[00:15] - intros and what's an architect?
[03:55] - a quick overview of contributions from his "minion days" on WebForms
[06:38] - origins of NuGet
[10:28] - signalR and important forks in the road
[17:05] - discovering the impact of signalR
[17:37] - filling the knowledge gaps - learning to scale up
[21:12] - regrets in signalR - lessons learned
[23:33] - moving to architect for ASP.NET Core
[28:40] - when David knew he was an Architect
[30:35] - the importance of having the right manager
[32:35] - how did he land at Microsoft? planning ahead during college
[36:52] - meeting Bill Gates
[38:30] - all the way back - David's first computer
[40:48] - all about Barbados and Rihanna
[45:24] - mentors and the importance of learning to debug
[47:11] - best career advice from Scott Guthrie
[48:00] - on networking
[48:48] - David's productivity hacks - work life balance - personal backlogs
[50:45] - coping with the ambiguity of architect role and sense of accomplishments
Awesome interview, resonated a lot with me!
Very inspiring talk indeed. Your journey has been quite adventurous David! I have also been recently made Team Lead at work and I've found that I am not getting my coding stuff done because I'm always helping out the other devs to understand what they need to do to get stuff done - so I enable others to do thier jobs and that is one of my jobs now.