Armistral (Armi to those who know him well) learned his love of technology from his paternal grandmother (Madonna) who was the operator of one of the first, largest and longest lived BBS in the Midwest. She bought a new computer every year or so, and would let him tinker with the older ones and play the newest games every time he traveled back to Iowa for the summer and holiday breaks.

Games were what set Armi on a technical career path (although his parents never would have guessed it at the time). It was all the tinkering with the 86 PCs (Set Blaster, IRQs in the AUTOEXEC.BAT, CONFIG.SYS memory games and just DOS generally) that was setting him up for a life in computer technology with the delayed gratification of taking days to install and configure some game only to play it for less time than it took to get it to run successfully.

Programming adventure games in BASIC was another way for Armi to spend far more time than you would expect indoors while his adolescent years sped by. He had a few friends brave enough to beta test them and enjoyed endless hours fixing them when they broke.

Electronics captured Armi’s imagination and he learned to build circuit boards by hand, solder transistors, resistors, capacitors and switches to make strobe lights and other ridiculous devices that were entirely unsafe to use under any circumstances, but which occupied his hungry little mind at all hours, and (mostly) kept him out of trouble. Even today he enjoys whipping out the old soldering iron and putting together a recreational device every so often.

Armi learned everything he knows on the job in his 20+ years in IT, and every day is another chance to learn something new. He was a very successful consultant/manager/director in the waterfall world until one day when Scrum hit him over the head and completely changed his outlook on how best to get work done. He trained to be a Scrum Master with Mike Cohn (the unofficial 3rd creator of Scrum,) and received professional mentoring from Ken Schwaber on how to transition to and scale Scrum in 2005 (if he can only manage to meet Jeff Sutherland, his Scrum fanboy dreams will be completely satisfied).

What Armi enjoys most about his work is seeing the lights go on and the passion flare in people and teams when they understand for the first time how truly revolutionary, adaptable and effective Scrum is, and begin to take personal responsibility for it. 

What Armi desires more than anything else professionally is to see the values and principals of the Agile Manifesto become the new standard by which teams are formed and supported in the global corporate culture.