I've been practicing in the spirit of the principles behind the Agile Manifesto for over 25 years now. I've had the great fortune of working with brilliant colleagues, and we've achieved amazing things together. There's no better way to learn what effective self-organizing teams ought to look like than being part of of a few.
My software engineering background ranges from software-hardware co-design involving various assembler languages (Z80, 8085, etc.), PL-M, Fortran (different variants, including writing [in C++] data-parallel F-90 cross-compilers for supercomputers), Cobol, Pascal, many variants of Basic, xBase-family languages (including dBase, FoxPro and the like), some Eiffel, Prolog, Lisp, Scheme (even wrote a continuation-passing-style compiler for Scheme in Scheme itself ;), oodles of C and C++, some Objective C, a sprinkling of Java, quite a few XML Schemas, some Open Laszlo, some Ruby, etc.
Starting in the early 2000's I've attended various Agile conferences and spent some time with inspirational folks like the delightfully insightful Craig Larman, the pragmatic Jim Highsmith, the no-nonsense Alistair Cockburn, the intense Jeff Sutherland and the tenacious Jeff De Luca. They've inspired me to focus on transforming the organizations I work with by influencing as many leaders and practitioners that I can reach. I find that leaders tend to respond well to Lean concepts, which paves the way quite nicely for Agile transformations.
I read avidly on most matters lean and Agile, having built up quite a collection of books from both the Agile series and the bookstore at www.lean.org Over time, I've also acquired a close appreciation of Lean, being a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt practitioner as well.
I now serve as the global leader of the Software Engineering Profession at HP, and lead HP's Agile Mentoring Office, providing coaching and mentoring for lots of teams and clients engaged on the journey to perfecting their practice of Agile Methods in the pursuit of sustainable business value.