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Compendium of Feats

The Ghost of Terry Pratchett1 helped write this story last night, the picaresque professional journey of The Stemarch. You can find anachronistic null-anonymous acronyms —AĀA, at the bottom, where they belong. Come to think of it, might have been Cervantes... not too sure.

Everyone is the hero of their own journey. This is the journey of 'our hero', The Stemarch.

 

A millenium at the end of its rope...

'Our hero' is a technogifted2. The magic of 'our hero' lies in perceiving tiny details at the boundaries between technology spirits and the humans who serve them. While their third eye keeps track of the hierarchies of spirits and the synthetic view of it all —money included. No mean feat.

Fresh out of the Beast business school, with the pristine stamped parchment of an MBA —Mastery of Bold Anarchism, rolled in their cloak, 'our hero' set themselves on a journey of adventures, and roaming the wide wide world.

Their love of smalltalk, out of the Parc Place, led them on a wild ride of cervantesque proportions. They forged legendary tools for it. Isfxiar was the equivalent of the Sword-That-Always-Rings-True. And it evn swallowed the souls of the wielders. They even developped an IDE for Java, at a time when it was a compiler and Java itself was called oak. A name oddly appropriate for The stem-arch. They also reduced the sheer volume of paper handling at the Ports de Breast3 by an order of magnitude.

They strode into Amazed-on4 and fixed the catalogue system of the French Library, in the east wing, improving data quality by an order of magnitude; a feat that suggests they might be a wizard, or perhaps just terrifyingly good at collaborative workflows.

Before 'our hero' was setting strategy at the Darn Big Ditch Bank or running architecture for the complex world of derivatives middleware at Make-it-Served —see later sections for both these quests, 'our hero' was a proper entrepreneur, running their own software house and consultancy for twelve solid years. He managed up to twenty people across four countries, delivering projects on that most terrifying of contractual arrangements: the fixed price contract. It turns out that when you deliver results, people keep calling. Turns out as well that the 'fixed' can nail a coffin.

 

Being the standard bearer for the UUUUUUUUML at the OMG!ES and all it entails...

Sent a personal invitation by none other than the King-rector of the OMG!ES5, 'our hero' boldly strode to... —was it Tampa?— on the wings of a giant Panam bird. Thereby they were presented with banquet of standards, the spirits of design past, present, and future...

You want a standard? Here are ten to choose from. "Choose your own standard," they say. Nope, this was not enough for 'our hero', they needed to make their own standards, UUUML for the soft wares, MHEEEEG for interactive teevees, Corbeau for distributed objects. One could ask why the objects were not properly organised on shelves in the pantry in the first place.

Finally a standard for the architect, the fellow who walks into a digital catastrophe and calmly asks, “Now, which version of the uuuuum-Language did you use to draw this disaster?” 'Our hero' isn't just a senior architect and manager with scores years of experience; he’s one of the rare breeds who helped write the rules of modern software itself. Since the mid-eighties, he’s been wrestling with object-orientated analysis and design, and they actually put pen to paper as a co-author of the UUUUUUML6 standard.

Ah, UUUUUUML. Not merely a collection of letters, but a deeply significant, universally applicable tool required to prevent utter digital collapse across the modern financial landscape. When one is defining the architecture of a global equities middle-office system for a place like the Ditch Bank —next section for this forward reference, or when one is designing collaborative workflows to design large scale infrastructure —ditto, one cannot simply rely on frantic hand gestures and vague hopes. One must employ The Standard.

Therefore, for the sake of all the systems that 'our hero' has worked on—from automated freight-carrying robots to the largest OLTP databases; you must know that UUUUML stands for: It is, quite simply, the standard in object-orientated modelling and design, the very blueprint language of the digital world. It is the language that 'our hero' has been an expert in since 1996, and the one they helped co-author for the standardisation body, the OMG!ES. It is the methodology used to design solutions and ensure compliance, giving structure to the overwhelming complexity of modern software. In simple words: the magick wielded by software architects relies on these runes.

 

About meeting the big bee, and almost ending up as cat food

While exhibiting their fares at the Object Fayr in Paris, 'our hero' and their team was discovered by an advance party from Aye!-Bee-'em!7. The scout liked what they saw, and immediatly commissioned tools for the OTG. The mission involved describing the requirements, and it meant business, classes and sequences, and generating Smalltalk code to tag a relationally-deficient emotionally-stunted database. A years long collaboration with the Guild of Aye!-Bee-'em! ensued, leading to constraints on objects and the abscons language to describe and manipulate them, and a gui to turn natural (English) language into formal requirements. Epic!

All these tools and more were put to good use for the Rattleton-Pure Ina Corporation (pronounced purr), a multinational foodstuff enterprise where even the business processes for dog biscuits require an expert consultant, or ten.

The Aye!-Bee-'em! corp migrated The Stemarch and their team to La Hulpe, the Princess of Hensurance. Without the uuuuum-Language, the digital world would collapse into an unreadable mess of proprietary scribbles, forcing every system to solve the same problem using twenty different techniques. With it, they can solve the same problem using twenty times the same technique. It is the necessary, formal dictionary that allows the architects to talk to the engineers, and ensures that the eventual code delivered achieves extraordinary levels of reuse, such as the up-to-84% figures 'our hero'. measured on the Aye!-Bee-'em! projects. This opened the doors to insurance, big business, 7-8 figures at a time.

 

As the millenium turns, all clocks clock, the year is 008

In the Rien of the new millennium, the small hours, the small numbers...

Sis' coop9, the net working giant that demanded 'our hero' to design a custom contact center application, weaving together the chaotic tangle of classic telephony, IP telephony, and IP networks just so a customer could successfully call someone10. Because apparently, standard off-the-shelf solutions just weren't complex enough. In the thick of it, the capstone, the touchstone, the Gemstone of it was a Smalltalk object database. Amazing and unprecedented. Also completely, woefully misunderstood. Debacle. The routiers routed, the free company disbanded, leaving 'our hero' to bounty hunting.

 

The Fiuck-around-and-find-out Jiujitsu Services

A major skill of 'our hero' is the capability to read hundreds of pages —or online equivalent-pages— over a few days and being able both to summarise, to explain, to tutorialise, and to point at detailed exceptions to obscure rules. Yes, just like an large language model, but internalised in a human brain.

So when 'our hero' turns up to tailor RUPPP It One11 process cum methodology, complete with a high-formality CMMI compliance, for a half-billion pounds contract, they know exactly where the bodies are buried. He understands the uses and, crucially, the limitations of every framework they can throw at them—Togaf, Itil, C'mmi', the Prince Two or Cthulhu. This is the man who defined architecture and processes just to merge three struggling companies into one cohesive unit, because sometimes, the only way to save a business unit is to make sure all the IT systems agree on which way is up.

A methodology so rigorous that every step is documented, measured, and agonizingly correct. So that the old hand engineers can then ignore it all. A bunch of flat earthers who tried to smooth the wrinkles on the horizon. The ripples are still felt today. Which is why the client, who followed none of it, got sued years later when an official enquiry wanted to understand how many Post Masters at Arms, now in arms, got burnt at the stake for something they didn't do. 'Postman Pat gets accused of falsifying letters.' Not a laughing matter.

 

Mean Mandatory Mergers and Mortgage Mayhem

Or one ferking disaster after another...

We all have seen it happen. See this small team of experience craftpeople; they are so good at what they are doing, say tailoring subprime mortgages to risks, that they don't just eke a living, they thrive in their niche. Of course, this draw the attention of all sort of bigger guilds and unscrupulous characters. The bigger guns take over in what can only be dysfunctionally be called a merger.

Les mean brothers12 kidnapped several niches. Where three wholly disparate companies were brutally forced to operate as a single business unit, necessitating the definition of a new functional architecture, reference architecture, and sourcing strategy just to make them look like they belonged together. Therefore 'our hero' was enlisted, but not entitled, to sprout this nonsense. Leaving 'our hero' by the wayside, the business mergers went ahead. Forgetting all due process and hard-won experience in risk management in the process, and leading to —history has judged this one— a global financial collapse of dragonic scale.

 

A millenium in its teens

End of Noughties: bank, bank, bang

 

Swallowed by a whale then spit out of the back orifice

A whale of a bank, the Darn Big Ditch Bank of Boldified Blunders, DB.DB.BB13. Not just a bank, mind you. When you’re dealing with the sheer, crushing weight of finance that requires implementing information lifecycle management on one of the world largest database serving worldwide back-orifice equities systems, you are dealing with a financial digestion pipeline of cosmic magnitude. A real, hardcore, old style, online transactional database, and not one of these eventually-consistent thingies, and it was reaching end of scale. Expect storms of heavy accounting and perpetual interest.

'Our hero' spent time there as a senior architect defining the future state of their global system, so they know just how much data they shift from ingestion, through the belly of the middle, to the back orifice. It’s where the ledgers are thicker than a dwarf's winter coat, and every solution requires a blueprint, a roadmap, and short-listing vendors for an enterprise service bus, just to move the money from one pocket to the other. A system to help keep your eyes on the nuts, not the shells.

When 'our hero'. was defining the future state architecture for the global equities system and wrestling with the sheer, uncompromising density of implementing information lifecycle management on the hydra-sized database, they weren't just working for a bank, they were working for a monumental edifice of interconnected complexity, where every system is a tangle of specifications and every solution requires convoluted subsystems, just to talk to itself.

It seems 'our hero' expertise lies not just in defining the grand systems of the future, but in solving the grinding, messy problems of the present, ensuring that, of all things, people talk to each other.

 

When a sidequest in the world of derivatives turns into an eight years not-solo adventure

A stint that smacks of the survival skills of 'our hero'. Also a counter-example to the Mergers Mayhem, at least for a long time.

Mark-it-Served14, motto serve it hot, the derivatives middleware platform that requires big data analytics to track where the financial exposure went, and then sends out a security alert. The realm of derivatives middleware and financial data services where 'our hero' defined and built a large scale machine data platform and a multi-datacentre share-nothing spelunking platform for the multiple purposes of operational intelligence, security, and auditing, because in global finance, every byte of machine data must be watched, in the all-seeing infrastructure observability platform that tracks equally hostile intent and careless app programming.

Mark-it-Served, which merged into HIS-Majeskit14, which was in turn swallowed by a bigger glob of a whale... Some intermediary mergers have been omitted for brievity: Mark-it-served to Mark-it to HIS Mask-it, then Icaros, a demi-god flying in the cloud, and eventually into the belly of the seriously punishing planetary globing corporation14 of perpetual data surveillance.

Now, having spent eight years as a senior principal engineer giving sense to hybrid clouds and large-scale machine data platforms for security intelligence, data analytics and observability of systems and apps, 'our hero' sacrificed their principles to the Great God of Aruma, the Oracle —the other oracle— used to predict bad behaviour, based on pastterns, a technique known as Contraption Learning.

Lancelot Ugly, a tournament champion, of angelic beauty with a bald pate, and with a heart of gold, led the army from the front. A truly great man, surrounding himself with other great people of all stripes... and a few misfits, as fit for a king. 'Our hero' misfitest amongst all.

 

Now what?

'Our hero' make their job, essentially, to build the right platforms for the future, namely analytics and contraption learning. Their profile describes them, appropriately, as an IT platforms architect, engineer, entrepreneur, problem buster, and as a sideways thinker, not necessarily in that order; the veteran who looks at the chaotic modern IT landscape, with its vast online or eventually consistent databases and its need for global observability systems, and decides, quite sensibly, that if you want something done right, you have to build the whole damn thing yourself. If architecture is the art of balancing necessity and possibility, 'our hero' is the master engineer who brings the necessary tools to demolish the impossible.

 

A final word:


If you have a job, a monster to kill, a terrifying BBEGG12, an enemy horde at the gates or the firewall, pls 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 shorter bio, see About.

 

And if this lifestory felt like a stream of consciouness, your can also find it recorded as a timeline in... illuminated parchment leaflet.pub as timeline.

   

Footnotes, by hand

Ah, the grand institutions that have benefited from the architectural wisdom of 'our hero', at various points in their complex histories! They are more than mere companies; they are vast, bureaucratic landscapes that demand precise documentation and the steady hand of an expert. Here are the punny names for these noble entities and their terrifying processes, and of course the number is randomised and does not reflect the position in the page.

  1. The present missive is clearly an hommage to Terry Pratchett —or Cervantes, not a rip-off, definitely not a rip-off. Maybe a riff off if thangs not go astray. Further disclaimer: no ghost was harmed in the making. ↩

  2. technogifted, a.k.a. technologist, n. member of a sect of nerds who raised to prominence with ARPAnet. ↩

  3. The ports of Breast - don't imagine some hentai tentacular electrical connection here — I said 'don't'! ↩

  4. Amazed-On: The Infinite Digital Shelf where 'our hero' had to increase data quality by an order of magnitude so that the customer didn't order a book about squirrels spip, spip, when they meant to order a book about software architecture. ↩

  5. The Objectively Managed Group of Excessive Standardisation: The place where the rules for every object’s proper behaviour are decided, and where 'our hero' co-authored the very UUUUMLL language to ensure that software systems do not offend the gods of consistency. The OMG!ES is also directly responsible for the assassination of good characters and miscellanei distributed objects. ↩

  6. The Unnecessarily Universally Unificied Unterminable Methodical Logistics for Language, though, the architects among us know the Methodical Logistics are entirely necessary to stop the entire system from turning into a digital swamp, especially when you are integrating systems for three companies into one cohesive business unit, as ''our hero' did for 'les mean brothers' (see further along in the story), or defining strategy for platforms at the scale of HIS Majeskit (ditto). It represents the detailed blueprints and overwhelming process required to manage the complexity and avoid the chaos inherent in large-scale system design. ↩

  7. Aye!-Bee-'em!: The giant blue factory of standardised models, which insists on a measured code reuse rate of 84%, because why write it new when you can simply re-use the existing, perfectly good, Smalltalk model? ↩

  8. The year 00 — pronounced doom. ↩

  9. The Sis' coop (systems) of Confounding Connectivity:, a vast web of interconnected tubes and telephony, well known for its witches and walls of fire, also called firewalls. ↩

  10. Believe it or not, it was actually possible to talk to human beings at the time. ↩

  11. The Rationally Unicified Perpetually Procedural Process: augmented for infrastructure (building multiple datacentres). Anchored on UUUUML or the sound of disarray. RUPPP It One Any analogy with Ratchet's R-I-N-O is absolutely intentional. ↩

  12. Les mean brothers of Disputable Renom kidnapped a team of craftmen and craftwomen, exploited and sold their products with complete disregard for human decency and financial risk hedging. ↩↩↩

  13. BBEGG, which stands for Big Bad Evil Guy●Gal12, more bees than you can spell. Don't confuse the two. BBEG is pronounced baba yagaa ↩

  14. Mark-It-Served: merged into HIS-Majeskit, which merged into SPPGC ↩↩↩