About Rob Myers
Introduction
Rob Myers is lead instructor and co-founder of Agile Institute, and a founding member of the Agile Cooperative.
For over 10 years, Rob has played a key role in numerous successful Agile, Scrum, and Extreme Programming (XP) projects. Rob has been training and coaching teams in Agile practices and object-oriented programming since 1999. During his more than 20 years in various software development roles, he has enjoyed consulting for leading companies in the aerospace, government, medical, software, and financial sectors.
Through Agile Institute and the Agile Cooperative, Rob teaches a variety of courses, including Essential Test-Driven Development, and Essential Agile Testing. Every course is infused with a blend of highly technical experience and techniques for preserving sanity in the workplace. He also visits teams in short-term and long-term coaching engagements to encourage and solidify the team’s Agile practices, and to help them improve and customize their Agile process.
Rob also delivers tutorials and talks at various conferences, namely Better Software, Better Software Agile Development Practices, StarEast, StarWest, and the Agile conference.
Reverse History
I’m Rob Myers. Let me tell you about my varied experiences as a reverse timeline and travelogue.
The “Seattle/Europe/Asia” Days
Having enjoyed developing and delivering training courses starting in 2002, I decided to delve deeper into training techniques. At Net Objectives, I had the opportunity to work with world-class instructors, to hone my understanding of Agile Methodologies (particularly Scrum), and to experiment with training techniques appropriate for technical and managerial pursuits.
I had the opportunity to coach Agile development and management techniques to companies both tiny and gargantuan, including the “Big -Bang” Agile transition at SalesForce.com, alongside Pete Behrens of Trail Ridge Consulting.
Net Objectives also leveraged my long-standing motto, “Have Laptop, Will Travel” and sent me to teach Agile courses in China, Denmark, and Ireland. I’m grateful for the chance to see many places and work with a wide variety of people.
The “Ann Arbor” Days
After 11 September 2001, everything came to a complete stop. People didn’t want to fly, or ask others to fly. I spent my days marketing and writing from my home office, and my nights defeating evil in the Baldur’s Gate II series of software games.
The story of how Mindful Software (me) and Menlo Innovations (co-founders of Agile Institute) came to work together is worth a page of its own (eventually). From November 2001, and for nearly all of 2002, I flew to Detroit to work with Menlo on a critical project for the University of Michigan Organ Transplant Center. Many of my best examples regarding XP planning techniques, pair-programming, and the value of Test-Driven Development come from this “OTIS2″ project.
During one break from the travel to Ann Arbor, I flew to Ottawa, Canada to deliver a two-week Extreme Programming immersion workshop for the Canadian National Research Council. This workshop was co-developed and co-delivered with Joshua Kerievsky of Industrial Logic. Though Joshua had to do most of the preparations for this workshop (due to my schedule), I discovered a deep enjoyment of teaching, and Josh and I worked together on one or two deliveries of Industrial Logic’s TDD course in 2003.
The “Portland” Days
Starting in mid-1999, and with XP coach Fred George’s blessing/accreditation/certification (actually, he just said “You’re ready!”), I started my career as an independent Extreme Programming (XP) coach.
I spent the latter dot-COM days in San Francisco working with various start-ups and financial organizations. Of course, one solitary Agile proponent could not rescue those start-ups from their own excessive spending and undisciplined processes. Tired of banging my head against an unappreciative brick wall, I kept an eye out for a real chance to help a team.
In early 2001, I joined James Shore in Portland, OR to run half of a distributed XP team. My flavor of Agile coaching is still strongly influenced by Jim’s pragmatic problem-solving talents (Jim is a walking Root-Cause Analysis Machine).
The “Minneapolis” Days
My “Agile” training began in 1998, before it was called “Agile.” Fred George (XP Coach Extraordinaire, now living in London) was hired by StorageTek to teach our R&D software team real object-oriented design based on Design Patterns.
He did that, plus he decided to run an experiment by using a collection of techniques assembled by Kent Beck. Fred handed out copies of a hand-drawn diagram showing how these nine “Extreme Programming” practices supported each other. The diagram had been drawn by Kent Beck at OOPSLA the year before, and by the time the team saw it, Fred knew of three more practices that had been added to “XP”.
StorageTek had purchased this small team just prior to the XP/OO training. I had been responsible for developing and supporting the software product on two-dozen different flavors of UNIX (ironically, there was never a Linux port because no clients were interested). One of those ports was for Intel’s massively-parallel Paragon machine running a modified Amdahl UTS port (if my memory serves). The port was done on-site in South Korea, my first trip overseas.
The “Phoenix” Days
There’s nothing Agile-related this far back, but my time from graduation in 1988 until moving to Minneapolis to be “The UNIX Guy” was spent working closely with some incredibly large clients, such as GE Aircraft Engine, GE Nuclear Energy, Hoffman-LaRoche, Bristol-Myers Squibb, Warner-Lambert, and the US Government.
Projects ranged from Oracle SQL-Forms applications to GCOS8 “Cray Station” software (which ran on GCOS8 mainframes so they could act as front-end processors, “FEPs,” for Cray supercomputers. HyperChannel, anyone?)
The “Flagstaff” Days
To have read this far, you are either a masochist, or an enthusiast for detail!
I graduated from Northern Arizona University in 1988 with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Computer Science and Engineering. I started as a Physics major, but I discovered latent talent for software, and noted that there was “no money in Physics” (this was prior to “Quants” creating derivative equations for Wall Street). Of course, my priorities have changed over the past 20 years.
I served as president of the NAU ACM chapter for one year during the mid-80’s, and now spearhead the organization of the “NAU Geek Reunions.” If you think you know me from the Flagstaff days, this link’s for you:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/AzzipAndReeb/
Earlier
I started programming small-business applications in 1983 or ‘84, and then did some mainframe work during summer breaks in college.
My father taught me how to program, and how to politely share CPU time with others. I started on a GCOS timesharing system at the age of 12, via a portable terminal with an acoustic coupler and heat-sensitive rolls of paper. The effects of years playing and examining Star Trek games can still be detected by the attendees of my TDD course.
I was born on 8/16/64…all powers of two! The time was actually around 2 am Eastern (poor Mom), so let’s call it 02:04. I was once reminded of this fact via a FAX from my parents, received in the Minneapolis offices in 1996, on my 32nd birthday (of course).
Now you know one reason for the name of the blog: http://PowersOfTwo.agileInstitute.com/
