What do you do if you're asked about your software architecture experience in an interview?

Remember to adapt the scale you are speaking about to the size of the company you are interviewing with. A 20k+ Global company or 1K sized SMB. This is the type of scale they work on

Mention architectural patterns you know, like microservices and monolithic designs, and how they impact maintenance and performance. Show that you not only understand the theoretical concepts but also know how to apply them in practice to create efficient and effective software solutions.

Always create a prototype. Prototypes allow you to fail fast and early—providing quick feedback and allowing you to discover your proof-of-concept. This is an important part of validating your work and checking your assumptions to make sure they’re valid and thorough.

Join online communities, and ask for feedback. This not only helps you improve your skills but also opens doors to new opportunities and collaborations. Plus, by sharing your work, you contribute to the community and can inspire others.

If you’re talking about open source projects, reviewing and debugging code in open source projects might be useful. But I think it would be very confusing in the beginning. Interesting open source project can be really large and the code will be so overwhelming. It takes a long time to understand how large code bases work. The project authors don’t care about explaining the internal design and structure and you will find most of the documentation is about the high level functionality that matters to the end user. However, getting involved with the team and contributing to the project is a huge learning experience.

More recently, I find that keeping principles like the Single Responsibility Principle in mind, and writing tests first, help the patterns to emerge in a more pragmatic way. When I recognise the patterns, I can continue to progress them more easily. I recognise them, but I no longer try to force them on code. If a Visitor pattern emerges it's probably because I've refactored out duplication, not because I thought ahead of time about the similarities of rendering a tree versus adding up its values.

Enterprise Architect is another software architecture tool, which supports a wide range of modeling languages, including UML, SysML, and BPMN. It provides a comprehensive platform for designing, visualizing, and testing complex software systems. Enterprise Architect is a versatile tool that caters to various aspects of software development, from requirements management to testing. Its features include traceability, project management, and collaboration features. It is also highly customizable, allowing you to tailor it to suit your project’s requirements.