Experience. I've worked in the world of waterfall, agile and everything in between. I love the speed of agile, but it comes with too much ceremony. I love the planning of waterfall, but it mired by change requests and slow development processes. I feel good software always has a good plan. Not everything needs to be laid out in the beginning to be successful, but there needs to be discussions on directions and tradeoffs. I've worked in enough industries and seen software build in many different ways. The best outcomes usually stem from the same place. They all start with good architecture decisions.

As you describe it, I can genuinely feel the value of that experience. This is exactly the kind of career I hope to build for myself.

I've mostly learned about architecture, Agile, Waterfall, and software processes through university and self-study, but I'm eager to see how these concepts are applied in real production environments. I'd love the opportunity to learn from experienced engineers like you and understand the reasoning and trade-offs behind architectural decisions.

There's a huge difference between studying concepts and seeing them applied at scale, and that's something I'm really excited to experience.