About

The story so far...

This is the thrilling tale of 'our hero', the senior principal architect cum manager who took on the largest, most tedious beasts of the digital jungle, armed only with a rigorously defined methodology and a certified pencil. Their career was less a progression and more a decades-long series of increasingly complex bounty hunts and sidequests, starting when they were merely an entrepreneur and development manager.

'Our hero' was the person you called when you needed things done by the book, even if the book was one they helped write, ensuring that even systems for the ports of the city reduced their physical handling by an order of magnitude. Then they ventured early into the chaotic realm of digital commerce, where the catalogue system was clearly suffering from a lack of decent paperwork. 'Our hero' rode in, cleaned up the business processes using collaborative workflows, and increased the catalogue data quality by an order of magnitude. And these were just the beginning of the nineties.

Since the mid-nineties, 'our hero' was a vital part of the holy standardization body, helping to co-author the unicified modelling language, the crucial lexicon that prevents developers from descending into absolute anarchy. Their skill in defining such high-ceremony process was immediately useful: they tailored a capability-maturity-model-integration-compliant version of the rational unicified process just to help a consultancy secure a colossal half-billion contract for a delivery institution.

'Our hero' hunts took them across continents and industries, always pursuing measurable, repeatable success. At a great corporate behemoth, they delivered an industry generic object-orientated model that achieved a legendary code reuse rate of eighty-four percent on subsequent projects; a number that still sends shivers down the spine of wasteful developers.

'Our hero' even took on network companies, where their task was to architect a custom contact center system that bridged the ancient world of classic telephony with the bewildering complexity of internet protocol networks. As most mercenaries, 'our hero' ended up betrayed by the princes who contracted them. Not only once, but thrice.

In the opening episode of the great merger, that led to the utter collapse of global financial institutions the world over, 'our hero' can be found in the thick of it. The bounty was defining the strategy and architecture necessary to weld three disparate companies into one functional business unit. Spemmel, her sister and dame of company was kidnapped by les mean brothers, and 'our hero' was propelled capstone chief architect, and tried to tame the financial hydra. They were chewed up and spit on a desert island beach in Phrang-na.

Eventually, the largest bounties always involve managing vast amounts of money and data. This led 'our hero' to a global bank multiple times, where they engaged in the monumental task of implementing information lifecycle management on arguably the world’s largest online database serving back-office equities systems, a feat of patience and sheer architectural muscle.

'Our hero' then turned their attention to the tricky world of derivatives middleware in a small promising financial data company, using big bad data analytics to monitor application health and performance. Their final great hunt involved spending eight years wrestling with machine data platforms, creating global logging and security services across vast hybrid clouds.

Now, 'our hero' is simply known as the co-founder of their own forge, chief technologist cum officer of the law of Murphy, The Stemarch, owner of this site. Having solved the problems of the present, their current, noble mission is to build the platforms of the future for analytics and machine learning. 'Our hero' remains, thankfully, a platforms architect, engineer, and certified problem buster.

Lately, The Stemarch profess to be semi-retired, whatever that means. Like any flee-beaten, long-haired old warrior, they have been re- sourcing, open- sourcing, and out- sourced by various corporations.

If you have a job, a monster to kill, a terrifying technical conundrum, an enemy horde at the gates or the firewall, DM me or write your message on the blue sky (at the bottom). If it is worth it, I will come out of my semi-retirement, and I will come through for you.

   

For a longer version, you can also refer to the compendium, where details of the feats are given, and the names are named.