I’m at a lot of standups now. Different teams, different days. And there’s a moment that keeps happening. Someone says they’re stuck, a couple of engineers dig into it, and it gets good. Somebody has a theory. Somebody else pulls up the logs.

And I have to drop, because I’m already late for my next meeting.

I miss building. I don’t think I realized how much until I kept leaving rooms right when it got interesting.

Don’t get me wrong, architecture has been great. There’s real accomplishment in it. When a project you helped shape finally wraps up and it’s running, that feels good. But it’s a different kind of good. It’s slower, it’s spread across a lot of people, and by the time it lands you’ve been away from the details for a while. You were part of it, but you weren’t the one who made it work.

That’s the part I miss. Having something working in front of you that wasn’t there before. Starting from nothing and getting to a thing that runs. Writing the code, hitting the problem, chasing it down. Tuning something for performance. Setting up DR and actually trusting it.

I can’t point to one moment that defines it, because it happened so many times. The one that sticks is the late night. I’d be working on something, it wouldn’t work, and at 11pm it would finally click what I was doing wrong. Then I’d keep going, because there was no way I was sleeping on that. Nobody asked me to stay up. I wanted to.

That feeling hasn’t gone away for engineers, even now that a lot of debugging starts with asking AI what’s wrong. You’re still the one in it. You still have to know whether the answer makes sense, and you still get the moment when it works. I’m just not the one getting it anymore.

So can you get that as an architect? I don’t know yet.

My best guess is POCs and pairing. In an earlier post I said I wanted to build more proof-of-concept work into the role and sit with teams when I could. I still think that’s what scratches the itch. But I’ll be honest, I haven’t done either yet. It’s been going a lot slower than I wanted, and that’s on me. I’m still figuring out the role, and how I want to operate in it.

The reason I haven’t given up on it is that I’ve talked to architects at other companies who work a lot more like engineers. They’re assigned to a team and work directly with that team. They’re in the code, building the thing they’re proposing. Some of them are the best engineers I know.

Their organizations are smaller, so it’s not a perfect comparison. But I don’t think that means it can’t work here too. It just isn’t what my role looks like yet.

Some of that is load. Our team recently grew, which is a good thing, and we’re about to start spreading out areas of concentration. Less on my plate should mean more room to build.

And there’s a lot I want to do with that room. There are skills I need to develop. There are areas I want to dig into and get a lot more familiar with. Some of it is stuff I’ve been putting off for months because there was always another meeting.

There’s also a bigger question under all of this. I need to figure out if architecture is really the right path for me, or if I’m an engineer deep down. I’ve always called myself an engineer first. I just never had to find out if that was true.

I want another 11pm where something finally clicks. Maybe that’s how I find out.