About The Author

Back in the early days I had been a fabricator of industrial controls and instrumentation for seven years, after which I was invited to join the company's Quality Assurance team, we were going to make a dash for our ISO-9001 certification. The company paid for professional training and education compromising of an in-depth study of Joseph M. Juran's Triligy as a part of our continuing commitment to Quality and Customer focus. I was also promoted to a Lead Technician/Fabricator. But in 1997 disaster struck, I was involved in a motorcycle accident that would change my life. I missed a year of work to physical therapy, and this was more than my employer could handle. This, sadly, turned out to be ok as they didn't survive another year before 20+ years of company history vanished into the corporate ether. Indecor was a great company.

When I was finally freed of physical therapy I tried to work for another company, Amatek, who also manufactured instrumentation, but I was only partially committed to them, and was beginning to see that the job didn't interest me anymore; I just didn't feel challenged enough. So with little fanfare I made the jump into Information Technology, which had been a hobby of mine since around the 7th grade. I quickly moved up from Desktop to Network Administration, then Infrastructure Engineering, and when the IT universe started to collapse, I found myself taking on a interesting support [contract] role at DuPont's Stine Haskell Research and Development facilities. While there I learned to support a wide range of liquid and gas spectrometers, NMRs, and a plethora of centrifuges, scales, and microscopes. It was here I began to appreciate programming and started to program in my spare time. Once again I quickly outgrew my position, but I found myself challenged and wanted to expand my duties, however at the time DuPont was ill prepared to offer a position based off of my actual responsibilities. With even less fanfare than my IT career started I severed my duties as a contractor.

I left DuPont on a Friday; Monday morning I began a new contract at Dade Behring through a new consulting firm. My task was quite simple, convert a Linux based Subversion server over to a Windows based one. I performed this task, and found that I loved the company and the position. For the first time in many years I found myself not only challenged by the position, but discovered it to be a personally rewarding one as well since Dade Behring was a Medical Diagnostics company. I found myself taking the extra step, adding the extra useful feature, remembering that one last layer of error trapping. I taught myself Java the first year there and vastly improved the build system, and the platform's installation base; reducing the products build time down to 20 minutes, from 2 and a half hours and reducing the install time by over an hour. Dade Behring noticed, and offered me a permanent position.

With much excitement I become a Dade Behring Employee, and remained so for one day. We were purchased by Siemens, and became an integral part of Siemens Healthcare Diagnostics, where I am quite happy to work to this day. While at Siemens our development teams began to move away from the Waterfall approach and started to move towards an Agile way of thinking. We were all trained on the SCRUM framework and began forming or scrum teams. After a spell we recieved training from Bob Hartman . The training was great and energized our teams. We've been actively sprinting for about a year. My team has a lot of promise and has made amazing strides towards greatness. We're actively being coached by Dan Mezick and Don Blair. I highly recommend them both.

Even more recently, I have become a Certified ScrumMaster, through the teachings of Peter Borsella, also highly recommended.