Erik Talboom

In 1996 my mother tried to convince me to focus my studies on computer sciences. Of course as any good 18 year old, I didn't agree with my parents and even added the statement: "Have you completely lost it mom, I'm not going to spend my life sitting behind a computer doing some stunningly boring jobs." So I chose a different path that took me from bioengineer, over biochemistry straight towards (yeah, you don't have to guess twice) computer sciences.

I started off my career as a systems engineer in a couple of music academies trying to help them set up a decent and useful network. During those first years I took a lot of evening classes to get my bachelor degree in applied computer sciences. We had to choose one of two specialties. It seemed like an obvious choice to go for the systems engineering specialty in view of my work. But after my first programming course, my mind started to switch completely. After three years of hard work I got my degree and started off as a part-time freelance .Net developer while also teaching programming classes on different levels (bachelor classes in evening school and technical university).

After two years of uncertainty and frustration in the Belgian educational system I took the big step towards being a fulltime developer. I got the opportunity to work for the Flemish government on a big project to rewrite one the important systems to maintain the agricultural data from all Flemish farmers (what crops they are growing, how much land they have and more importantly how much funding they would get out of all this). I learned a lot about real projects and what life as a full developer is like. We were using this strange methodology-thingy called Scrum, I’d never heard of it. It seemed like a good idea and in time it really started to grow on me. I started reading more and more about it, wanting to really "get it" because there were a couple of things that weren't clear to me. After some time I started to realize: the essence of Scrum was something different than what we were doing.

It wasn't long after that I was transferred to a different team that was going nowhere fast. My duty was to get them back on track and finish up the project at hand because there was a huge project waiting around the corner for which delay inacceptable. In the beginning of 2010 I took over as scrummaster of the team and I had a lot of crazy ideas to experiment with our scrum implementation. But I still had the feeling I lacked a certain familiarity and basis to be a good scrummaster, so I registered for the CSM course. Tobias Mayer led the course and really opened up the world of scrum to me. I realised so much about scrum, about teamwork, about myself and about real life in IT projects.

I am really convinced that Scrum is the new way of thinking about organising work and really working together to make the projects at hand as successful as possible.

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