in-midst-my-life

The Problem with Professional Identity

The conventional curriculum vitae forces a fundamental act of self-falsification. A professional with twenty years of experience across theory, engineering, art, and systems architecture must compress that multidimensional identity into a single linear narrative — typically optimized for one imagined reader with one imagined set of priorities.^[1] Goffman's dramaturgical analysis demonstrates that all social interaction involves strategic self-presentation: we perform different versions of ourselves for different audiences. The traditional CV denies this reality, demanding a single canonical performance regardless of audience. The result is a document that systematically disadvantages polymathic professionals — those whose value lies precisely in the breadth and interconnection of their capabilities.^[2] Bourdieu's concept of cultural capital reveals how hiring processes reproduce class structures through credentialing rituals that privilege legibility over depth. This project asks: what if the CV were not a static document but a dynamic system — one that assembles itself in response to what the employer actually needs?

Technical Architecture

The system is a full-stack monorepo implementing hexagonal architecture — a pattern where the core business logic has no dependencies on frameworks, databases, or delivery mechanisms.^[3] The outer shell consists of a Next.js 16 frontend (React Server Components, streaming SSR) and a Fastify 5 REST API (JSON Schema validation, OpenAPI generation), but these are interchangeable adapters around a framework-agnostic core. A Node.js orchestrator manages long-running processes — credential verification, compatibility scoring, and the autonomous Hunter Protocol. The monorepo shares four packages: Zod schemas for runtime type validation, a core logic library, a narrative model that structures professional identity as a directed acyclic graph, and a design system implementing the visual language.^[4] Fowler's separation of domain logic from infrastructure concerns maps directly onto this architecture: the mask system, compatibility scorer, and credential verifier are pure domain objects that know nothing about HTTP, databases, or React.

interface ProfessionalMask {
  id: MaskId;
  category: 'cognitive' | 'expressive' | 'operational';
  label: string;
  description: string;
  filterRules: FilterRule[];
  emphasisWeights: Record<SkillDomain, number>;
  narrativeTemplate: NarrativeTemplate;
}

interface FilterRule {
  field: keyof ProfessionalIdentity;
  predicate: (value: unknown) => boolean;
  transform?: (value: unknown) => unknown;
}

interface CompatibilityResult {
  overall: number;
  factors: {
    skillMatch: number;       // 0-1: technical skill alignment
    valuesAlignment: number;  // 0-1: cultural and ethical fit
    growthFit: number;        // 0-1: trajectory compatibility
    sustainability: number;   // 0-1: long-term viability
    compensation: number;     // 0-1: mutual economic fit
  };
  recommendedMasks: MaskId[];
  narrative: string;
}

type MaskId =
  | 'systems-architect' | 'theorist' | 'analyst' | 'strategist'
  | 'creative-director' | 'writer' | 'visual-designer' | 'performer'
  | 'engineer' | 'product-owner' | 'devops' | 'data-engineer'
  | 'polymath' | 'mentor' | 'researcher' | 'founder';

The Mask System

The core innovation is a taxonomy of 16 professional masks organized across three categories: cognitive (how you think), expressive (how you communicate), and operational (how you build).^[5] Jung's theory of psychological types established that individuals operate through different dominant cognitive functions — thinking, feeling, sensation, intuition — and that these functions manifest differently depending on context. The mask system operationalizes this insight for professional identity. A "systems-architect" mask emphasizes abstraction, pattern recognition, and cross-domain integration. A "creative-director" mask foregrounds aesthetic judgment, narrative coherence, and visual language. Both are truthful representations of the same professional — they differ not in what they claim but in what they emphasize.^[6] Gardner's multiple intelligences framework provides the empirical grounding: professional competence is not unitary but manifests across linguistic, logical-mathematical, spatial, musical, bodily-kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic domains. The 16 masks map onto these domains, ensuring that no dimension of professional identity is systematically invisible.

Verifiable Credentials

Professional claims are cheap. Anyone can list "10 years of experience" or "led a team of 20." The system integrates W3C Verifiable Credentials to provide cryptographic proof of professional claims without requiring trust in the claimant.^[7] Each credential — employment history, project contributions, skill demonstrations, educational achievements — is issued as a signed JSON-LD document that can be independently verified against the issuer's public key. The employer viewing a filtered CV sees not just claims but verified claims, with visual indicators distinguishing cryptographically attested facts from self-reported assertions. This architecture aligns with the broader movement toward self-sovereign identity: the professional controls their own credential wallet, choosing what to present and to whom, without depending on centralized platforms like LinkedIn to mediate trust.^[8] Allen's ten principles of self-sovereign identity — existence, control, access, transparency, persistence, portability, interoperability, consent, minimization, protection — guided every design decision in the credential subsystem.

Compatibility Scoring

The five-factor compatibility scorer operates on the responses the employer provides during the diagnostic interview. Rather than asking "Do you want a frontend developer?" — a question that presupposes the categorization — the system asks about team dynamics, project complexity, communication patterns, growth expectations, and compensation philosophy. These responses are parsed into five orthogonal dimensions: skill match (technical capability alignment), values alignment (ethical and cultural compatibility), growth fit (trajectory compatibility over a 2-5 year horizon), sustainability (whether the role's demands match the candidate's working style), and compensation (mutual economic fit).^[9] Meadows' systems thinking framework — particularly her concept of leverage points — informs the weighting: values alignment and growth fit are weighted more heavily than skill match because they predict long-term success more reliably than technical overlap alone. Each factor produces a 0-1 score, and the weighted synthesis generates both a composite number and a ranked list of recommended masks. The system does not produce a binary accept/reject; it produces a nuanced profile of mutual fit.

The Hunter Protocol

Most job search tools are passive: they wait for the candidate to search, filter, and apply. The Hunter Protocol inverts this. Running as an autonomous Node.js process within the orchestrator, it continuously monitors job boards, company career pages, and professional networks for opportunities that match the candidate's full professional graph — not a keyword-reduced summary.^[10] Simon's concept of bounded rationality explains why traditional job search fails: the search space is too large and the evaluation criteria too complex for manual scanning. The Hunter Protocol applies satisficing strategies — Simon's term for finding solutions that are good enough rather than optimal — across the opportunity space, using the same five-factor compatibility model to score potential matches before the candidate ever sees them. Opportunities that clear a configurable threshold are queued with a compatibility breakdown, recommended masks, and a draft narrative tailored to the specific role.

The I-II-III Pipeline

This project is the most architecturally complete demonstration of the eight-organ system's core thesis: that theory, design, and production are not separate activities but phases of a single creative-institutional pipeline.^[9] The mask taxonomy draws directly on ORGAN-I's ontological frameworks — Jung's psychological types, Gardner's multiple intelligences, Goffman's dramaturgical analysis — and translates them into computable structures. The hexagonal architecture pattern, refined through ORGAN-II design work, becomes the production skeleton. The W3C Verifiable Credentials integration demonstrates that institutional-grade trust mechanisms can coexist with individual sovereignty.^[10] Simon's distinction between natural and artificial sciences — where the artificial is concerned with how things ought to be rather than how they are — captures the project's ambition: this is not a description of how hiring works but a prescription for how it should work, implemented as a working system with 68+ commits, 21 database migrations, and a test suite that validates every claim the system makes about itself.

By the Numbers