You may have noticed that I've written a number of articles that provide my perspective on what it means to be an architect and the issues the architect faces (re: The Hard Skills are the Soft Skills, The Many Species of Architects, The Passage from Developer to Architect). Some of you may be wondering, "Who is this guy Rob Daigneau, and what qualifies him to make such statements and recommendations?". Well, maybe it's time that I tell you something about myself.
I'm currently the Chief Architect for Synxis, the leader in distribution technology and services for the hotel industry. We're actually a subsidiary of Sabre, the same company that owns Travelocity. In this role I am concerned with both strategic architecture planning and solution architecture. Here are a few things that I do in this role:
Prior to Synxis, I served as the Director of Application Architecture for Monster.com. In that role, I was responsible for the global technical strategy where it concerned Monster's use of the .Net platform and associated technologies. My team had an enterprise focus and served operations in North America, Europe, and Asia.
For most of my 18 years in this career I've oscillated between being a manager, solution architect, technical lead, business analyst, and developer. Of those years, I spent 11 years in consulting working for 1 Big-5 firm, 1 boutique , 2 mid-sized Microsoft consultancies, and I also ran my own firm for 4 years. Aside from consulting, I worked in financial services, insurance, and manufacturing as an employee for a total of 7 years.
In my career, I've designed and developed software for robots, Unix systems, IBM mainframes running MVS, VAX mini-computers and workstations, OS/2, and Windows, to name a few. The databases I've worked with have included, in chronological order, DB2, Oracle, Sybase SQL Server, and Microsoft SQL Server. I can't possibly recall all of the languages that I've learned and forgotten over the years, but the most notable include C, C++, COBOL, Visual Basic, Java, and SQL (PL/SQL and T-SQL). I currently use C# ... it's a very nice language !
Going further back, I graduated in 1988 with a Bachelors degree, magna cum laude in Management Information Systems ( I think they call it Computer Information Systems today) from Connecticut State University. I originally started as a Computer Science (CS) under-graduate, but decided to switch over because I was intrigued by business studies. Nevertheless, I continued to study CS concepts throughout my under-grad years, and continue to do so up to today. The languages I used in college included C, Pascal, Assembler, and COBOL
I started programming in 1982 in my senior year of high school. The languages for me back then were BASIC and Assembler. My computer was a TRS-80 Color Computer which had a whopping 16 kilobytes of RAM and a clock speed of about 8mhz. My monitor was a little color TV set. There was no storage capability except for a ROM cartridge slot for games, and the option to plug an ordinary cassette tape player into it. If I wanted to save a program I was working on, I had to run a command that would save my work off to the tape player ... no lie. It really sucked too because half of the time the recording would become corrupted. When you attempted to reload your program, it would oftentimes be lost forever! Regardless, I was hooked and decided that I would create a career for myself with these really cool machines!
What a ride it's been!