Learning software architecture

How can you grow in your career as a software engineer? One way is strengthening your technical background and learning software architecture. Software architecture is about designing and building systems. For example, imagine building a site like Netflix or Facebook from scratch.

Software architecture can be daunting. There are lots of components and concepts to understand. In this post, I'll break down how to learn software architecture so it's clearer and more approachable.

To start, it's okay to be confused about architecture. Your level of understanding will increase as you progress in your career. When I was in college, I took a web programming course, and they explained how to build a website. It was my first time learning about web technologies, and it didn't make that much sense. As I got my hands dirty and built my own websites, I got a better sense of how things worked and fit together.

To learn how to build a big system, start small. As you grow more experienced, you'll work on larger and larger projects. Before working on software architecture, it's helpful to first make smaller changes. This helps you understand individual components in more detail and develop your technical skills. For example:

1. A starter task is a friendly introduction to a codebase. You may change the color of a button or tweak some text on a page.
2. The next step up is building a small piece of functionality. This helps you understand a component in more detail. You may build a signup form or add the logic for creating new users.
3. Owning a project end to end helps you understand how pieces fit together. Instead of working on pieces of the signup flow, you may own the whole project from start to finish.

Owning a project teaches you a lot.

• During project planning, you learn about different approaches for solving a problem. You get practice thinking through pros/cons and figuring out what's best to do in your scenario.
• Other folks can provide feedback. More experienced engineers can point out system-level issues you may have missed. For example, they can encourage you to think about the error-cases. What happens if various parts of the system go down? A product manager or designer can help you think about how to best handle user flows.
• You learn from your mistakes. Learning any new skill requires trial and error. If your system collapses under duress, then you'll learn what not to do in the future. For example, at Digit, I worked on building an onboarding flow, and nobody could sign up at first. Improving the success rate taught me a lot about how to design systems and launch projects.

Many software architecture concepts are more obvious when you work at a company. For example:

• Scalability is about how many people use your system and how it responds to increased traffic. For example, the "ChatGPT is at capacity right now" error message indicates ChatGPT is having a scalability issue. If you work on a popular system like ChatGPT, you need to handle lots of people accessing your site at once. You don't tend to run into this on smaller projects with fewer users.
• Reliability is about if your system stays online and how it handles errors. For example, after Musky acquired Twitter, people ran into all sorts of reliability issues and bugs. To prevent an internet hullabaloo, you need to handle errors with grace and prevent incidents.
• Maintainability is about how easy it is to make changes to your system. If you don't make changes after a class project is due, then long-term maintainability is less important. At a company, you work with a large enduring codebase. You can see what people wrote in the past. Did they build a solid foundation, or did they cobble something together with sticks and duct tape? When you make changes, do you try to repair the foundation or hack something together?

Reading helps fill in gaps in your knowledge and learn concepts in more depth. Technical reading feels different from reading for fun. It's brain-intensive and slow-going. While reading a technical book, I find it helpful to take notes. For instance, after you read a paragraph, try to summarize it in your own words. That helps you check your understanding and prevents you from zoning off.

Two books I recommend are:

• Web Scalability for Startup Engineers - This book talks about building a website from scratch and how to design systems to work for lots of people. It helps you understand the core concepts and best practices used here.
• Designing Data-Intensive Applications - This book explains data technologies in depth. It's dense and slow to read - I could read about 8-10 pages per hour. If you take your time, you'll learn a lot from this book.

To improve accountability, you can start a book club. Unlike a recreational book club, you'll want more frequent check-ins. For instance, you can read a chapter (or part of a chapter) every week or two.

Learning software architecture takes time and patience. Through working, owning projects, and technical reading, you can learn the skill bit by bit. This will help you decode buzzwords, design systems, and ultimately expand your influence as a software engineer.