Architectural views

Owning a hammer doesn’t make you an architect. Neither does mastery of a programming language, deep familiarity with a framework, or years of experience shipping features. Those things make you a skilled builder. Architecture requires something different.

The distinction isn’t about seniority or job title. It’s about how you see a system.

Consider the simplest possible example: a glass of water. A developer asked to describe it might say it’s half full. Another might say it’s half empty. Both are technically correct. An architect recognizes that the glass is simultaneously half full and half empty—and that which framing matters depends entirely on who’s asking and why. The security team cares about different things than the operations team. The business stakeholder cares about different things than the end user. The architect’s job is to hold all of those views at once, without collapsing them into a single perspective.

This is harder than it sounds. We develop expertise by going deep, by building intuition within a specific domain or technology. That depth is valuable. But it also creates gravity—a pull toward solutions that look like what you already know. The experienced Java developer sees a Java problem. The database specialist reaches for normalization. The instinct is to solve from strength, which is often right but sometimes catastrophically wrong.

Architectural thinking requires a kind of disciplined openness: no preconceptions about platforms, no allegiance to specific technologies, no assumptions about what the solution will look like before you’ve understood what you’re actually solving. The primary aim—meeting business requirements through the intelligent application of technology—sounds obvious stated plainly. But keeping that aim primary, rather than letting technical preferences drive toward solutions looking for problems, is a genuine discipline.

Object-oriented design principles have existed for decades and still trip up experienced developers. Not because the concepts are difficult to understand, but because applying them requires a shift in how you think about systems—away from procedures and toward relationships, responsibilities, and boundaries. Architectural thinking is a similar shift, at a higher level of abstraction.

The journey toward it is more instructive than arriving at it. Every system you reason through from multiple angles, every stakeholder conversation where you’re genuinely trying to understand their view rather than sell yours, every design decision you revisit after seeing its downstream effects—these build the capacity. The destination keeps moving.