LinkedIn Profile Mapping Guide

This guide defines the authoritative mapping from Mike Hall’s canonical resume sources (_data/resume/), portfolio evidence, and sovereign root domain (just3ws.com) into LinkedIn’s standard profile concepts.

It reflects the evolution of the system:

  1. Sovereign identity and canonical URLs rooted at https://just3ws.com.
  2. EMR-Bear Approach A compliance: strictly omitted from public resume and LinkedIn profile (disclosed only on formal post-offer background checks if requested).
  3. Independent Project Rule: strictly two current independent projects (Phalanx Duel and Technical Conversation Archive), with local AI runtime experiments (agent-tooling) purged from public positioning.
  4. Flagship Portfolio Features: anchoring The Sovereign Verification Project and The Sound Above oral history rewatch series in the Featured section.
  5. Terminal IC Positioning: targeted as Staff Software Engineer or Principal Software Engineer across platform architecture, production systems, and observability.

1. LinkedIn Headline (220-Character Limit)

LinkedIn’s headline is the single most indexed search field. It must clearly anchor technical domain authority without ambiguous management titles or buzzwords.

Staff Software Engineer | Platform Architecture, Production Systems & Reliability | OpenTelemetry & Legacy Modernization | just3ws.com

Length: 133 / 220 characters.

Alternative Headline (Principal Systems Architect Positioning)

Principal Software Engineer | Systems Architecture, Production Reliability & Observability | Distributed Systems & Incident Leadership | just3ws.com

Length: 147 / 220 characters.

2. LinkedIn About / Summary Section (2,600-Character Limit)

Mapped from _data/resume/summary.yml, docs/site-refresh/panoramic-view-positioning.md, and docs/career-strategy-audhd-principal-engineering.md.

It follows the 3-level scan architecture:

Copy-Paste Text for LinkedIn About

I make complex software systems easier to understand and safer to change.

I am a Staff Software Engineer rooted in the discipline of software engineering. I work across multiple levels of system architecture: from low-level runtime behavior and telemetry through distributed asynchronous workflows and cross-team organizational boundaries.

I stay close to the code while helping engineering teams agree on what the system actually does, who owns it, and how to change it safely under live customer load.

What I Do:
• Platform Architecture & Legacy Modernization: Reconstructing undocumented execution flows, untangling multi-step state machines, and executing zero-downtime database and framework migrations.
• Production Reliability & Incident Response: Serving as final escalation lead for high-severity production failures, diagnosing live system pathology, and turning outages into permanent organizational and operational safeguards.
• Systems Observability: Founding and scaling OpenTelemetry working groups, defining metric and trace semantics across polyglot microservices, and aligning telemetry with actual business transactions.
• Sovereign Verification & Systems Tooling: Building deterministic, offline-capable developer runtimes, UNIX pipeline tooling, and local-first evaluation harnesses that hold non-deterministic systems accountable.

Selected Work & Proof:
1. OneMain Financial (Staff Software Engineer): Led acquisitions platform architecture, resolved multi-step session state integrity failures, founded the enterprise OpenTelemetry Working Group, and modernized core Rails services under continuous production load.
2. The Sovereign Verification Project: A 3-part forensic systems investigation analyzing DSP audio restoration, dual-model generative divergence, and domain boundaries under 345,000-volt high-tension transmission lines (just3ws.com/series/ai-competence/).
3. The Sound Above: A 37-episode technical rewatch series examining twenty years of Software Craftsmanship history, community building, and engineering stewardship (just3ws.com/series/the-sound-above/).
4. Phalanx Duel: A tactical rules engine and zero-indirection state machine built in Go, TypeScript, and SwiftUI (just3ws.com/phalanx-duel/).

Full Resume & Technical Deep Dives: https://just3ws.com
Direct Contact: mike@just3ws.com

Length: ~2,250 / 2,600 characters.

LinkedIn allows pinning links, media, and articles at the top of the profile. Pin the following 4 canonical surfaces:

  1. Canonical Interactive Resume
    • URL: https://just3ws.com/resume/
    • Title: Mike Hall: Staff Software Engineer (Interactive Resume & Technical History)
    • Description: Complete chronological career history, technical taxonomy, verified outcomes, and ATS plain-text exports.
  2. The Sovereign Verification Project
    • URL: https://just3ws.com/series/ai-competence/
    • Title: The Sovereign Verification Project: AI Competence, Forensics & The Digital Theremin
    • Description: A 3-part architectural investigation analyzing whether AI code synthesis produces durable tools or overfitted mirages beneath high-tension power lines.
  3. The Sound Above Technical Rewatch Series
    • URL: https://just3ws.com/series/the-sound-above/
    • Title: The Sound Above: 37-Episode UGtastic Technical Rewatch Series
    • Description: Historical practitioner dialogues and contemporary systems commentary examining software craftsmanship, testing, and autonomy from 2011 to 2026.
  4. Systems Cartography & Architecture Retrospectives
    • URL: https://just3ws.com/case-studies/
    • Title: 4D System Cartography: Case Studies in Production Modernization
    • Description: Forensic methods for mapping legacy monoliths, identifying failure modes, and establishing safe operational boundaries.

4. LinkedIn Experience Section (Positions)

Each entry is mapped from _data/resume/positions/*.yml. LinkedIn limits position descriptions to 2,000 characters.

Policy Guards:

1. OneMain Financial (Staff Software Engineer)

Key Outcomes: • Final escalation point for high-severity incidents: led live diagnosis, coordinated investigations across teams, aligned system understanding, and drove action plans with verified ownership. • Turned production failures into institutional learning: ensured major incidents yielded tightened monitoring, clarified ownership models, updated documentation, and corrected cross-system touchpoints. • Reconstructed end-to-end acquisition flows by mapping execution from browser layers through application tiers, middleware, and downstream services, creating the operational model for risk review and change planning. • Re-architected session state handling across multi-step acquisition workflows, eliminating a persistent integrity failure that compromised customer tracking, diagnosis, and recovery. • Founded and led the OpenTelemetry Working Group: set telemetry and trace standards, trained engineering and cybersecurity teams, and transitioned ownership once adoption became self-sustaining. • Led platform modernization under continuous load: executed staged framework and database upgrades while maintaining regulatory compliance and zero unplanned downtime. • Founded an enablement function to isolate platform, risk, and remediation engineering from feature delivery, securing sustained progress on long-horizon stability.


### 2. SK Holdings, Inc. (Senior Backend Developer)
- **Title:** Senior Backend Developer
- **Company:** SK Holdings, Inc.
- **Dates:** 2019 to 2020
- **Location:** Chicago, IL
- **Description:**
```text
Led backend stability, performance, and platform modernization for high-traffic Ruby on Rails applications, improving full-text search, campaign delivery pipelines, and data layer reliability while systems remained under live customer load.

Key Outcomes:
• Search Infrastructure Modernization: Eliminated external cluster failure modes and reduced infrastructure operating footprint by migrating legacy Sphinx search to optimized MySQL full-text search and relational indices under live production traffic.
• Zero-Downtime Rails Upgrades: Led Ruby and Rails framework upgrades across core applications, sequencing database schema migrations to guarantee zero downtime during platform modernization.
• Asynchronous Pipeline Optimization: Streamlined Redis and Sidekiq background job processing, isolating high-volume email campaign queues to prevent worker starvation and delivery latency.

3. ActiveCampaign (Senior Software Developer)

Key Outcomes: • Legacy Query Modernization: Replaced ad-hoc global data access with structured, cacheable query patterns in the PHP backend, enabling unit testability and sub-second query execution across multi-million contact datasets. • Automated Verification Gates: Hardened Ember.js automated test suites across core CRM contact workflows, creating safety gates that enabled non-breaking legacy backend refactoring.


### 4. Earlier Engineering Experience (Selected Summary)
For earlier positions on LinkedIn (BenchPrep, ReachLocal, Coderwall, Groupon, TicketsNow / Ticketmaster, Obtiva, Follett), keep descriptions concise (under 800 characters) emphasizing hands-on delivery, distributed systems, and software craftsmanship.

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## 5. LinkedIn Projects Section

Per `CODEX.md`, strictly two independent projects are featured:

### Project 1: Phalanx Duel
- **Name:** Phalanx Duel: Tactical Rules Engine & State Machine
- **Associated With:** Independent Engineering
- **URL:** `https://just3ws.com/phalanx-duel/`
- **Description:**
```text
A deterministic, multiplayer tactical rules engine that translates physical board game mechanics into zero-indirection software architecture. Built with an immutable state machine, strict event sourcing, WebSocket synchronization, and OpenTelemetry instrumentation in Go, TypeScript, and SwiftUI.

Project 2: Technical Conversation Archive & The Sound Above

6. LinkedIn Skills & Endorsements (Top 5 Pinned)

LinkedIn permits up to 50 skills, but recruiters scan the top 5 pinned skills first:

Pinned Top 5:

  1. Platform Architecture
  2. Distributed Systems
  3. Observability (OpenTelemetry)
  4. Production Systems & Reliability
  5. Ruby on Rails

Complete 30-Skill Set for Search Indexing:

7. Interactive Localhost Tooling

The live web tool at https://just3ws.localhost/linkedin/ automatically generates formatted copy-paste blocks for all sections, computes live character counts against LinkedIn’s field limits, and warns if any field exceeds boundaries.