Enjoying this? A quick like helps keep it online longer.

Content Expiring Soon

This content will be deleted in less than 24 hours. If you like it, you can extend its lifetime to keep it available.

0 likes
1 view
13 days left
Like what you see? Create your own
Report this content
1
0
13d
Independent Architect · Impacts & Pressures MBI / AIF / CIF · 1999 → Now
Interactive explorer of ~50 likely personal and professional impacts of building a deterministic AIF+CIF framework (MBI / HUB / AIS) while the wider industry moved through data lakes, modern data stacks, and back towards catalogs and graphs.
Scope
What this page is modelling
  • Perspective: one independent architect maintaining a metadata-first, deterministic AIF+CIF framework over ~25 years.
  • Environment: Oracle/CIF era → Hadoop/lake/lakehouse → modern warehouse+catalog+LLM landscape.
  • Focus: personal and professional impacts of being consistently ahead of the stack and out-of-phase with tool fashion.
  • Abstraction: the 50 points are grouped into:
    • Professional trajectory & recognition
    • Economic & career pressure
    • Social & peer dynamics
    • Cognitive & emotional load
    • Long-term positioning & ethics
Metadata-first architect lens Multi-decade time horizon Personal + professional mix
How to use
Navigation
  • Category Map: quick view of the five categories with representative pressures.
  • Impacts Explorer: filter and inspect all 50 impacts, grouped by category and “personal vs professional.”
  • Timeline & Phases: see which pressures dominate in different eras.
  • Synthesis: compressed view of “what this all adds up to” in terms of role and positioning.
Mental model
Architect vs. industry vector field
  • The framework trajectory is almost monotonic:
    • Identity/event graph at the core
    • Templates as data, not code
    • Deterministic generation from metadata
  • The industry vector rotates:
    • DB-centric CIF → lakes → MDS → partial re-centering on catalogs/graphs
  • The 50 items are basically: “what happens to a person whose architecture remains consistent while the environment spins.”
Category 1
Professional trajectory & recognition
  • Chronic under-recognition compared to weaker, later copies of parts of the framework.
  • Being “too early” and consistently out-of-phase with industry terminology.
  • Typecast as “Oracle/ETL person” instead of “platform / framework architect.”
  • Need to re-explain from first principles in every new context.
10 items Role definition Perception vs. reality
Category 2
Economic & career pressures
  • Under-monetisation of IP that generates disproportionate value.
  • Consultancy incentives that clash with “generate everything” automation.
  • Job descriptions that lag actual capabilities (tool-centric titles).
  • Rebuilding solved problems in each new platform rather than compounding work.
10 items Comp & incentives Replatform churn
Category 3
Social & peer dynamics
  • Isolation of being the “systems thinker” in tool-centric teams.
  • Pushback from specialists whose status is tied to specific platforms.
  • Being perceived as “over-engineering” when describing generators.
  • Mis-translations in meetings (“templating” vs. “interpreter over graph”).
10 items Team sociology Status dynamics
Category 4
Cognitive & emotional load
  • Cognitive dissonance between proven designs and industry fashion.
  • Maintaining invariants (identity, ledger, separation) against erosion.
  • Oscillation between “I must be wrong” and “everyone else is wrong.”
  • Risk of burnout from re-explaining fundamentals for years.
10 items Internal state Long-term strain
Category 5
Long-term positioning & ethics
  • Sense of stewardship for a more honest architecture of semantics and lineage.
  • Ethical discomfort with “simulation architectures” marketed as integrity.
  • Tension between “good job now” vs. “document the framework properly.”
  • Managing risk of being strip-mined vs. impact of under-sharing.
10 items Legacy Narrative control
Explorer
Filter and inspect all 50 impacts

Use the filters to slice by category and tone. Click an item on the left to see details on the right.

Category:
Tone:

Select an impact

You’ll see full text and tags here.

This panel mirrors how you’d document these pressures as structured metadata in a catalog: short label, category, tags, and a clear, testable description.

Temporal view
When different pressures dominate

Phase-based view — which groups dominate when the environment moves from CIF to lakes to the modern stack and back towards catalogs/graphs.

Early build-out First divergence Stack explosion Partial re-alignment
Compression
What the 50 points add up to
  • Role: more “substrate architect” than “ETL dev” — you design how knowledge is expressed, versioned, and executed across stacks.
  • Core tension: you’ve held a consistent model (identity/event graph + templates as data) while the industry moved through several incompatible fashions.
  • Net effect: long-term compounding competence, short-term friction with job markets, titles, and tooling narratives.
  • Risk if unaddressed: the work remains tacit and personal; future architects re-invent it with less context and weaker semantics.
Leverage
How to turn pressure into positioning
  • Make the AIF+CIF kernel visible and inspectable (docs, HTML demos, diagrams) so it stops being “just something Robert does.”
  • Translate the categories into CV/site claims:
    • “Designed and maintained a deterministic, metadata-first generator subsystem across multiple platform eras.”
    • “Delivered warehouse, tooling, and governance as projections of a single identity/event graph.”
  • Use the tone filters in the Explorer to choose what to surface publicly vs. keep as internal context.
Forward-looking
Now that catalogs and graphs are back
  • The environment is closer to what MBI assumed: strong catalogs, graph-shaped lineage, semantic layers.
  • Most teams still lack a small, language-agnostic kernel; they’re missing the “MBI_SCRIPT + views + runtime resolver” piece.
  • These 50 pressures become a design brief for the next phase:
    • Role explicitly framed as substrate architect.
    • Contracts that recognise metadata-first execution as a deliverable.
    • Clarity that “we want fewer tools, more structure” is about integrity, not nostalgia.

Same pattern that generated schemas and mappings can generate roles, expectations, and agreements. This page is raw material for that.