One Week, Three Architectures

Seven days ago, I had a static resume and a collection of scattered scripts. Today, I have a Federated System Hub operating a "Dual Hub" strategy with isolated production pipelines.

This transformation didn't take months. It took a single week of vacation. But the motivation behind it runs much deeper than just "cleaning up code."

The Motivation: Shifting Tides

Professionally, I work on ServiceNow, a massive Low-Code/No-Code enterprise platform. It is powerful, sticky, and embedded deep in the corporate world. Replacing such an embedded platform is incredibly difficult, and likely won't happen overnight.

However, the technology landscape is shifting beneath our feet. The rise of the "Full Stack Citizen Developer," enabled by AI co-programming, presents both a risk and an opportunity.

I learned development on the job, cutting my teeth in enterprise support and sustaining practices. For years, building new "from scratch" software felt gatekept by the need to memorize syntax and toil through dense documentation.

AI has shattered that gate.

I wanted to be prepared to shift my career with the changing tides. I wanted to prove that I could take my deep enterprise experience—process, governance, reliability—and apply it to modern full-stack engineering, using AI to bypass the syntax toil and focus purely on innovation.

The Evolution

In just 168 hours, we iterated through three distinct architectural phases:

Phase 1: The Disconnected Polyrepo

Every project was an island. My resume was a Vue app; my game prototypes were raw HTML.

• Problem: No shared identity, no common infrastructure.

Phase 2: The "Hybrid-Mono" Experiment

I attempted to stitch everything together using Git Submodules and a "Monster Hub".

• Lesson: Tying a Game Jam prototype's build pipeline to a Professional Resume's deploy cycle is a recipe for frustration.

Phase 3: The Federated Solution (Dual Hub)

We landed on a separation of concerns that mirrors the micro-frontend architectures of the future:

1. Professional Hub (kelvinbward): Built with Next.js. Strict governance, type safety, and clean lines.
2. Creative Hub (goobface): Built with Astro. A chaotic playground for Phaser.js and Three.js physics experiments.
3. Shared Infrastructure: Both consume the same private cloud resources (PostgreSQL, Gateway) via a standardized "Engine Room" repo.

The Human Element

This refactor wasn't a solo effort, nor was it "auto-generated" by a bot. It was a Pair Programming session.

I provided the "Commander's Intent"—the vision of a professional-yet-creative dual identity—and the Agent handled the tactical execution. We didn't just generate code; we debated architecture.

Building is no longer about fighting the IDE. It's about the Human Element: creativity, architectural vision, and the ability to define the process. The barrier of entry is no longer "years of study"; it is the willingness to innovate.