In early 2003, I joined the Australian arm of ThoughtWorks in Melbourne. Given the emphasis on agile development throughout ThoughtWorks, the fit has been an excellent one for me, and I have already had many opportunities to put my agile skills to the test. Most recently I have worked as an Iteration Manager, where I get to lead and coach the team on technical agile practices, and also work closely with the Project Manager for planning purposes.
I had become interested in Extreme Programming during 2000, and in 2001 became one of the first members of the Melbourne XP Enthusiasts (MXPEG) group. I have been very active in the group ever since, and with the help of a few friends have managed to support the local community on getting agile projects up and running.
In January of 2003, a group of people who had been involved in promoting agile development around Australia got together and formed Australia and New Zealand Agile Methods SIG (AMSIG). This group was targeted more at supporting IT managers and project managers rather than the techies that regularly attended most of the agile groups around the country. I was one of the founding members of the group, and became immediately involved in the regular Melbourne meetings.
That didn't last long though, as I moved to Sydney shortly afterwards to work on a project for ThoughtWorks. So instead, I organised the Sydney meetings... :-) Whilst in Sydney, Neil Roodyn, who had founded the Sydney XP Activity Club (SyXPAC), decided to head off overseas for a while for work, and asked me to help run the group in his absence. I've been doing this ever since, and Jason Yip has helped by leveraging the group to initate a Sydney Geek Night.
Prior to joining ThoughtWorks, I spent most of my time working on Java-based projects in a multitude of roles, including developer, team-lead, build-maestro, and agile coach. These projects were mostly large-scale enterprise applications for big corporates in Melbourne. The early years involved a lot of CORBA integration work, and this evolved to J2EE applications in more recent times.