SA Architect – What is it all about and why is it important to me?

Overview

SA Architect is one of the information technology communities in South-Africa, promoting information sharing of knowledge and guidance, relating to system architecture, technology and principles. The users of our whitepapers and hundreds of quick reference posters will be aware of the vast and invaluable  range of information sharing that has been established by a small, but passionate community.

The SA Architect Home …	An example of one of the many quick reference posters available in high-quality JPG and reasonable-quality PDF formats.

The community is sponsored by a number of companies, but is entirely community owned and driven. Check out the leads section for a list of active community leads whom you can contact for more information.

Academia

Another huge objectives by the community is to assist the academia with experience from the field, the trenches as we call the day-day development environments, and ensure that the university graduates are not only aware of the technologies used in “real;-life”, but are in a position to near seamlessly integrate into project teams and become productive within a very short period of time. One of the projects we initiated a while ago and that my colleagues are taking forward, is the Rhodes Academia program.

Rhodes university … see https://www.ru.ac.za for more information.

Here are some links to previous reports:

• Academia Program
• Rhodes Road show Evaluation
• Academic Interoperability Road show @ Rhodes Day 1
• Academic Interoperability Road show @ Rhodes Day 2

In early March, the academia program at Rhodes will go a step further, sponsored and driven by BB&D, taking the students through a few days of practical use of Team Foundation Server *(TFS) and Visual Studio Team System (VSTS). Watch my colleagues blog at https://dotnet.org.za/zaydkara/ for reports on the “amazing” event in early March.

Why is SA Architect important to me?

Although I am on the other side of the planet these days, I am still committing some of my personal time to SA Architect, because I believe that the community is doing an invaluable guidance and education program in South-Africa, ensuring that the architectures of IT solutions in the future are build on solid foundations.

The combination of SA Architect community leads and South-African MVPs (Microsoft Most valued Professional) is an exceptionally valuable combination and the ladies and gents involved in these initiatives are real community champions! We even have TFS MVPs from Brazil and Spain contributing to the quick reference posters … these guys “rock”!
 

Contact me if you would like more information on SA Architect or chat to me about the community program in general.

Keep an eye on Zayd’s blog …