field notes / project lab

Part 5 — The brand going forward

The most useful realization is that my professional identity does not need to be reduced to a conventional category.
It needs to be legible. The task is not to hide the unusual combination of strategy, creative craft, systems thinking and technical development. The task is to demonstrate that this combination is coherent and valuable. MikaelOS is the clearest expression of that proposition to date. It presents an environment in which creative portfolio work, essays, technical notes, developer journals and software experiments coexist inside one operating system. It shows not only what I have done, but how I think, how I learn and how I build. Going forward, the personal brand is becoming less about titles and more about function. A strategist who builds. A marketer who codes. A creative lead who understands systems. An editorial architect. A developer of tools for knowledge work. Or, perhaps most accurately: A curious and occasionally alarming generalist who builds practical systems to make complex things understandable. The glint in the eyes remains. The difference is that it is now attached to a functioning product, a growing body of work and a clearer explanation of why all the seemingly disparate pieces belonged together all along.

Series

Building MikaelOS

  1. Part 1 — The problem with being difficult to categorize
  2. Part 2 — The polyglot, the generalist and the mad scientist
  3. Part 3 — Personal branding as systems design
  4. Part 4 — Building the machine that explains the builder
  5. Part 5 — The brand going forward