A structured mentoring track for engineers who already ship strong code — and want to own decisions at the level of the whole system, not just their own commits.
The premise
An architect is a senior engineer who is also good at the things around the code — system design, quality, delivery, and people.
You don't stop being an engineer. Solid software-engineering skill is the foundation everything stands on. Architecture is the four pillars you raise on top of it — and the beam of communication that ties them together. This track builds each one deliberately, on a real system you already know.
Is the code itself sound, changeable, and safe to build on?
Boundaries, coupling, cross-cutting concerns, reviewing at the level of architecture.
Will the system do its job, and hold up as it grows?
Requirements to architecture, trade-offs, data, scale, integration, failure modes.
How do we know it works — and keep knowing?
Test strategy, automation, non-functional requirements, reliability, SLOs.
How does it reach production safely and repeatably?
CI/CD, infrastructure, containers, observability, incident response.
Can you get the organization to build the right thing?
Leading without authority, decisions, stakeholders, estimation, your own focus.
Can you make the case so others follow it?
Design reviews, respectful disagreement, ADRs, persuasive technical proposals.
What changes by the end
The roadmap · one month per module
Each module is a self-contained month with a weekly live session and real work in between. Every month produces one artifact about the same system — so by the capstone you have a portfolio, not a pile of notes.
Pick one real system you own or know well — it's the case study for the whole track. Rate yourself across the five pillars. Map what's fragile, undocumented, or scary to change.
Not "learn to code" — make code others can build on. Module boundaries and coupling, dependency direction, cross-cutting concerns, designing for change, reviewing at the level of architecture.
The core month. Requirements to architecture: real constraints, data as the center of gravity, sync vs. async, consistency vs. availability, integration boundaries, distributed failure modes. Draw in C4, record decisions as ADRs.
Quality as a system property, not a phase. The test pyramid and what belongs where, automation that pays off, non-functional requirements, quality gates, and reliability through SLOs and error budgets.
How software reaches production safely. CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, containers and orchestration at the level an architect must understand, observability as a design concern, incident response and rollback.
The part senior engineers skip and most need. Leading direction without formal authority, facilitating decisions when smart people disagree, stakeholder translation, realistic estimation, mentoring, and managing your own attention.
Combine everything. Take a real, sizeable problem and produce an end-to-end architecture — the design, the ADRs, the quality strategy, the delivery approach, and the plan to get the organization behind it. Defend it in an architecture review, and build a 12-month growth plan for the gaps that remain.
How it works
Every drill and artifact is about a system you actually know. No canned examples — one case-study system runs through the whole track and gets stronger as you do.
Each month's output is a document that would survive a real design review — a diagram, an ADR set, a strategy. The portfolio is the progress, and it's reusable at work on Monday.
Architecture has no single right answer. You'll practice naming the options, stating the trade-off, and deciding with reasons — then writing the reason down.
Frame the pillar, drill it on the real system, stress-test the trade-offs, produce and review the artifact. Once you know the shape, the work compounds.
Fit
Start the track
The roadmap above is the whole map — free to read and to use. When you want a mentor to run it with you, on your systems, book a baseline session and we'll start there.
TopTop · 14 years in software · Finland · remote, worldwide