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.)

[00:15] - intros and what's an architect?

[03:55] - a quick overview of contributions from his "minion days" on WebForms

[06:38] - 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