talk with Microsoft Architect Pat Helland

AJ: As an architect for many years, what kind of advice would you
give to someone who wants to become an architect?
PH: Architecture is a very interesting area. I liken it to building
architecture. If you stand back and think about what a building
architect has to do, they first of all have to think about a business need
and understand how to create a building that fulfills that business need.
Even more, the building needs have a feel to it. When someone
walks up and looks at the building, some emotion is conveyed.
At the same time, we have to deal with a myriad of pragmatics. How
is the air going to flow through the building? How will the people move
through the elevators? How do you make it comfortable and meet all
other environmental considerations? You have the functioning of the
building—the utilitarian object—combined with the fulfillment of the
business needs, combined with the effect that particular structure will
have on human beings.
Looking at that from the standpoint of software, you see exact
parallels. The primary goal of a software architect is to understand
and work out how to fulfill the business need. At the same time, you
want the software to relate to people and their feelings about using it.
While you are doing that, you have to deal with all of the transcendent
aspects of the darn thing functioning correctly and pragmatically.
A building architect dealing with a large building may not be an
absolute expert on elevators or airflow. But he has to know enough
about those areas to interact with the experts and bring it together into
a cohesive whole. Similarly, a software architect needs to know enough
about the different aspects of the larger system that they are putting
together to interact with the respective specialists.



Pat Helland has almost 30 years experience in
scalable transaction and database systems.
In 1978, Pat worked at BTI Computer
Systems where he built an implementation
language, parser generator, Btree subsystem,
transaction recovery, and ISAM (Indexed
Sequential Access Method).
Starting in 1982, Pat was chief architect
and senior implementor for TMF (Transaction Monitoring Facility)
which implemented the database logging/recovery and distributed
transactions for Tandem’s NonStop Guardian system. This provided
scalable and highly-available access to data with a fault-tolerant
message based system including distributed transactions and
replication for datacenter failures.
In 1991, Pat moved to HaL Computer Systems where he
discovered he could work on hardware architecture. He drove the
design and implementation of a 64-MMU (Memory Management
Unit) and a CC-NUMA (Cache Coherent Non-Uniform Memory
Architecture) multi-processor.
By 1994, Microsoft called and asked Pat to work on building
middleware for the enterprise. He came and drove the architecture
for MS-DTC (Distributed Transaction Coordinator) and MTS (Microsoft
Transaction Server). Later, Pat became interested in what today is called
SOA (Service Oriented Architecture) and started a project to provide
high-performance exactly-once-in-order messaging deeply integrated
with the SQL database. This shipped in SQL Server 2005 as SQL Service
Broker. Later, Pat worked on WinFS and did a stint in DPE evangelizing
to our largest enterprise customers.
For the past two years, Pat had been working at Amazon on the
catalog, buyability, search, and browse areas. He also started and
ran a weekly internal seminar series. He is excited to return home to
Microsoft and to work in the Visual Studio team!