Jason Chambers has a great blog entry called Do Architects need coding skills?, which talks about why architects need to be able to code. Given that this site is called Coding the Architecture, our thoughts on this will come as no surprise. In addition though, he also asks the following.
However, a more contentious question maybe - Do Architects need to maintain their coding skills once they've achieved the lofty status of architect. Well, I think it depends. Enterprise architects - possibly not (more on that later). However, for application, solution or product architects - I would say yes. There are many reasons why I think this is the case.
Again, I agree with what he says - you need to retain a certain level of technical knowledge so that you can competently define an architecture using it. And that itself raises another interesting question - *how* do you maintain your coding skills as an architect?
One of the problems with being promoted to or assigned as a software architect is that you might find that you can't code as much as you'd like to. This may be down to time pressures because you have a lot of "architecture" work to do, or it might simply be down to company politics not allowing you to code. It happens, and when it does, you run the risk of introducing a huge great gap between yourself and the development team. All is not lost though, because some of my advice for addressing this gap also applies here.
There's obviously no substitute for coding on a real project, but getting involved with the code reviews is one way to at least keep your mind fresh with technology and how it's being used. Of course, you probably have more scope outside of work to maintain your coding skills; from contributing to an open source project through to continuously playing with the latest language/framework/API that takes your fancy. Books, blogs and podcasts will get you so far, but sometimes you just have to break out that IDE.
