About

My name is Eric and I’m a Scrum Master and Agilist living in San Francisco, CA.  I was born in Mt. Vernon, Ohio area, a rural area in central Ohio.  I attended East Knox Local Schools for my middle and high school years.  After high school I went to college at Otterbein University where I received my bachelors degree in music education.  While I was there at Otterbein it was the first period in my life where I really felt like I fit in with the people around me.  Otterbein was a small private liberal arts school and I found it easy to fit in as one of the students.

I did some substite teaching for a couple years till I felt like i needed to move on. I got compliments from my work but I was never able to land a teaching job. There’s only a couple music teachers at each school district so it’s a hard market.

My start in the business world was working with small businesses.  When I say small I mean startups before startups were cool.  The first company there was only five or six of us working there.  It was an amazing time because the owner of the company wanted to grow the company and we did just that.  Then we’ll just say that there were some outsiders who brought in and I didn’t feel like my knowledge and abilities were respected by the new people brought into the company.  So I decided to move on and started working for another small company that a friend owned.

Now I don’t know if you’ve ever heard this say before after that experience I believe that doing business with friends is just not a good idea.  It just seems like someone always gets burned.  If you’ve not guessed I was the one who got burned.  I had my feelings hurt but I learned from the experience and moved on.  I simply found a new job and another small company.

Now mind you after college I did look for a teaching position but after looking for three years I ended up in the business world.  I had bills to pay and I found that my skills in management served me well.  I also found that I was pretty good at at understanding and using software.  This lead to me going back to school when I heard about an adult program from a friend at DeVry University.  There at DeVry University I received a second bachelors degree in Information Technology.  I was pretty proud of myself for this because the program had an accelerated timeline and while in the program I held a 4.0.

You may be curious by the nickname Tuba … I know I would if I were you.

Well I was visiting a good friend in New Orleans I was hanging out with a couple old friend.  One of those friends was actually the one who came up with this nickname.  We met up after I played a gig there in the French Quarter so I was hauling my Sousaphone. He yelled out ‘Hey Tuba!” and it stuck for obvious reasons.

In April 2011 I picked up by bags and moved to San Francisco.  I was ready for a change in life and due to some things going on in my life this seemed like the best time to make the move.  So here I am now living and working in the San Francisco Bay area.  I’m glad to be out of the snow and cold weather that Ohio has during the winter months.

Currently I am a Release Train Engineer (RTE) for a mobile application. I’ve been evangilizing Agile for about 10 years now. I’ve played the role of Product Owner, Scrum Master and now a Release Train Engineer. I’ve loved learning about Agile and Scrum because of the continuous improvement emphasis. In my roles I’ve needed to learn about being a servant leader. Being a servant leader is challenging because people need so many different things from you as a leader. So I’m currently working through a Scaled Agile Framework transformation and it’s going pretty well. My teams are producing and we’re delivering value to our users. Working software and happy customers. What couple be better, right?