It has been quite an interesting ride the last few months. In October I was very lucky to be offered an architect position in my company. I quickly joined my new team and got started on my first project.
It is quite different from my previous role as a senior .Net developer. I started on a project which is heavily data driven; We have maybe 6-8 transactional tables while we have around 25 seed data table which stores everything needed to control the business rules for the mid-tier and client. Also any type of message, regular expression, constants etc. are stored in the database. Basically no literals are allowed in the client code.
Surprisingly it works quite well but it does takes some time to persuade the developers that they must use these things. Once they understood the approach it worked quite well. The only problem is that the turnaround time for fixes increases because a fix often requires changes in the database.
We are now getting close to the time of release and it is getting quite hectic at work. Unfortunately we have a couple of guys who thinks that coming to work means you spend the first half an hour surfing the net and a break is required every 1-2 hours with more surfing. It kind of stresses me as I can see a large amount of defects and nothing is done about it. So we had a chat with them yesterday and hopefully it will help... time will tell.