My mother has a genius level IQ, and she taught me to do really hard puzzles. When I started getting difficult assignments at school, and especially when I started working, I discovered that everything is a puzzle. Puzzle skills prepare you for everything.
Before the first PC, before the first Apple, I was a computer nerd. I was the only student to build a computer in high school. I was the first student in college to have a computer terminal. As my focus became software, I wrote my own operating system, and learned every computer language and framework you have ever heard of. I taught waterfall and structured programming classes. I became a framework expert in my very first job.
While doing embedded (combined hardware/software) development, 6 years before the Agile Manifesto, I discovered “Agile” as an extension of the Rapid Prototyping framework. As I carefully experimented with it and documented it, but when XP and Scrum were published, I lost my chance at fame. But as I became a Scrum advocate, I found it to have mixed success; less success than the methods I had developed. I discovered David Anderson and went to his first conference on Kanban. I discovered Mary Poppendieck’s Lean Software Development, and became a reviewer of her second 2 books. Lean had the answers to the problems of Scrum.
With certification in Agile and Lean, I developed methods that visibly increase team throughput quickly, and teams loved them. I helped some team switch to Kanban, but most of the teams I work with continue to do Scrum Guide Scrum and add Lean and XP methods. Almost every team I work with improves, and some become high performance teams. I now work to scale this to the entire organization, what they now call Business Agility. It works!