Manu's Vault

Personal Radar Development

3 min readStatus:Seedling

Core Idea

Personal Radar Development is a structured framework for architects to track and manage their relationship with technologies, tools, and techniques across their career, creating a personalized landscape of what to adopt, trial, assess, or hold.

Explanation

What Is Personal Radar Development?: A continuous professional development practice that helps software architects systematically organize their knowledge and experience with the rapidly evolving technology landscape:

  • Modeled after the ThoughtWorks-Technology-Radar
  • Creates a visual and conceptual map of an architect’s relationship with various technologies, methodologies, and practices

Four Concentric Rings - Levels of Engagement and Confidence:

1. Adopt:

  • Technologies the architect actively uses in production
  • Confidently recommends to others
  • Proven tools that have demonstrated value through real-world application

2. Trial:

  • Technologies the architect is actively experimenting with in controlled environments
  • Not yet proven for full production use
  • Showing enough promise to warrant investment

3. Assess:

  • Emerging technologies that have captured the architect’s interest
  • Haven’t yet been evaluated through hands-on experience
  • Warrant watching and learning about but not yet direct investment

4. Hold:

  • Technologies the architect has moved away from
  • Either due to better alternatives emerging
  • Or discovering fundamental limitations through experience

Active Practice, Not Passive Tracking:

Requires regular review and deliberate movement between rings:

  • Trial → Adopt or Hold: As architect gains experience, make explicit decision
  • Assess → Trial: When architect commits time to hands-on exploration
  • Adopt → Hold: As better alternatives emerge or technology becomes obsolete

Multiple Purposes This Framework Serves:

  1. Clarity on investment: Provides clear guidance on where to invest limited learning time
  2. Decision history: Creates documented history of technology decisions and rationale
  3. Communication tool: Offers framework for explaining architectural preferences to teams and stakeholders

Integration with Daily Practice: When combined with The-20-Minute-Rule of daily learning:

  • Personal radar becomes both a map and a compass for career development
  • Learning activities feed radar updates
  • Radar guides what to learn next

Why This Matters

Without a structured approach to managing technology knowledge, architects risk making decisions based on outdated assumptions or getting overwhelmed by the constant stream of new tools and frameworks. The personal radar transforms continuous learning from reactive browsing into strategic development. It prevents both technology stagnation (staying with Hold technologies too long) and resume-driven development (adopting technologies without proper assessment). Most importantly, it creates accountability—architects must justify why technologies belong in each ring, leading to more thoughtful evaluation and clearer communication of architectural preferences.

Sources

Note

This content was drafted with assistance from AI tools for research, organization, and initial content generation. All final content has been reviewed, fact-checked, and edited by the author to ensure accuracy and alignment with the author’s intentions and perspective.

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