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Certificate of Hard&Soft Skills
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This certificate confirms that
Ilya Kompaniets
successfully completed the course «‎Solution Architect in the Wild»‎
lasting 12 weeks

Teachers of The Course
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Principal Solution Architect
Anton Dvornikov
Developer since 2000, has worked as a developer, team lead, and architect in product companies.

Built architecture and processes for a product involving a dozen teams, 200+ engineers, and microservices.

Currently building architecture and processes for a system with several thousand services.
Developer since 2003, has been teaching since 2008, training seniors and architects since 2018. He has shared expertise in more than 100 meetups and conferences.
Pavel is one of the founders of various communities of IT specialists, including ByChange, Free IT. He perfomed the roles of developer, team lead, architect, CTO in small startups, large corporations and product companies.

  • Architect: Miro, EPAM
  • CTO: AmadoAd Ltd., SplitMetrics, Leverice
  • Tech Advisor: LeoHome Inc.

Trained more than 1K developers over the past 15 years, including over 200 architects. Creates educational courses for many technical areas.

Specializations: distributed systems architecture, highload, microservice architectures, systems engineering, engineer growth, corporate communication.


Founding Teacher at Hard&Soft Skills
Pavel Veinik
The course programme included:
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Module 1. The Beautiful Theory of Solution Architecture

1. Architecture and the Architect
- What is architecture? Why is architecture important?
- Architectural contexts
- Types of architects, roles of a Solution Architect and an Enterprise Architect
- Methodologies: TOGAF, Zachman, FEAF. Choosing the right framework and applying it in practice

2. Business Architecture
- Value stream: How does a business create value, and why is it important for an architect?
- Business motivation: Business drivers, goals, objectives
- Stakeholder management: Identifying stakeholders, types of stakeholders, their interests. Power-Interest matrix. Practices for resolving conflicts

3. Requirements
- Functional requirements
- Non-functional requirements, assumptions. Architecture Significant Requirements, Constraints, Quality Attributes. Prioritization of requirements, requirement combinations, feasibility of requirements. Specifics of the Availability requirement
- Utility tree: How to build and use it in design
- A template for solving architectural problems for a Solution Architect

4. Building Architecture
- Architectural styles and approaches: Monolith, microservices, SOA, serverless, client-server, hexagonal, layered, event-driven, CQRS, data pipeline, plugin, repository, cloud-based, bus-based...
- Integration architectures
- Tactics for achieving Availability, Performance, and Scalability in distributed systems
- Patterns of distributed systems
- Algorithms for building architecture for beginners and more experienced architects

5. Architectural Strategy and Roadmap
- Initiatives, projects, programs. Sponsors and stakeholders of projects and programs
- Initiative and organization change management
- The company’s technological strategy
- System development roadmap

6. Blueprints and Reference Architectures
- Differences between reference architecture and design patterns
- Typical solutions for common systems and business needs

Module 2. Solution Architect Communications

7. Organization Analysis
- Defining the structure of an organization
- Culture: Types of cultures, defining the organization’s culture. Values and behavior in different cultures
- Managing expectations
- Agreements and career
- Finding your place and path within an organization

8. Building Trust in the Architect
- Specifics and boundaries of an architect’s influence
- Demonstrating broad expertise as a way to build trust
- Communication with managers, teams, product managers, and infrastructure teams
- Should an architect have their own pet project?

9. "Selling" and Justifying Solutions
- Documentation approaches that prevent questions
- Comparison tables
- Sales techniques for presenting solutions

10. Architectural Process
- Documentation: Strategy, roadmap, HLD, LLD, ADR
- Collaborative problem-solving: Event storming, DDD, and documentation
- Tools for maintaining architecture
- The hierarchy of architects, architecture boards, governance, standards

11. Presales
- Specifics of task setting, stakeholders, and design during presales
- Template for preparing an Architecture Proposal

Module 3. The Crazy World

12. Documentation
- Formats and approaches
- Documentation and processes
- Cross-review of architectural documentation
- Reality, cases, and examples: Knowledge in one developer’s head, outdated documentation, and unused documentation
- Contracts and agreements with adjacent teams

13. Entering a Project
- Goals and expectations
- Company culture
- Stakeholders
- Reality, cases, and examples: Cursed roles, impossible tasks, failing companies, overly influential developers, incompetent architects, inflated expectations, sabotage of solutions, and team resistance

14. Architectural Process and Architecture Evolution
- Example of a small product company with 10 engineers
- Example of a small product company with 20 engineers
- Example of a successful startup with 50+ engineers
- Example of a large product company with 500+ engineers
- Example of a small outsourcing project with 10 engineers
- Example of a “medium-sized” outsourcing project with 30+ engineers
- Example of an integration project
- Example of a digital transformation project

15. Even More Reality
- New features vs. tech debt
- Approaches to working with legacy systems
- The culture of real companies
- Examples of conflicts with product teams
- Examples of conflicts with infrastructure teams
- Changing the lead architect
- Burnout during presales

16. Trends and the Architect’s Development Path
- AI prospects
- Enterprise architecture
- The architect’s development strategy