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.) 0:15 - intros and what's an architect? 3:55 - a quick overview of contributions from his "minion days" on WebForms 6:38 - 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