Rüdiger's tech journey
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Rüdiger Wolf - 27 Oct, 2024
From a young age, I’ve always been driven by a passion for technology. My career journey has been a constant exploration of this passion. Most of my career as been working with business and software teams to build or enhance some product or service.
Table of contents
Open Table of contents
My first computer and interest in tech
I grew up in South Africa 800km 🔗 up the coast from Cape Town, which is at the southen tip of Africa.
My first computer in the early 80’s had 1KB of memory. 
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This lead me to spend hours and hours at the keyboard learning how to creating games. One good things lead to another and my school installed a computer laboratory full of BBC Micro computers. The technician installing them said that to really get into computers you needed to study electronic engineering.
Cape Town
After I finished school and a gap year backpacking around Europe I started my engineering studies at the University of Cape Town. I loved it! 
. I did a post graduate course in Finance and Accountancy.
By the way did you know what Cape Town is the birth place for AWS? It was Chris Pinkham’s 🔗, a director at Amazon, decision to move back to Cape Town from Seattle and Bezos who wanted to keep Pinkham on, that led to the founding the first non-USA development center. The Elastic Compute (EC2) service was born in Cape Town.
How many of you work with teams that deploy you code to linux based containers? It is likley that it will be based on the Ubuntu flavour of linux, which was created by a chap called Mark Shuttleworth 🔗, who also hails from Cape Town.
My first real job
After a few years at Siemens working in industrial automation. Factory automation like car assembly lines and cement factories.
Dot Com startup era
I started working at Internet startups. This was a crazy time. Imature technology and lots of young people. Dynamic Systems Delivery Method (DSDM) seemed like the best way to organise ourselves.
This was when I started my first foray into Agile ways or working, 1998.
I worked on big content management systems, internet banks, digital marketplaces and other exciting projects. The London startup I joined grew to 150 people with offices in UK, Germany and France.
London had a very active startup and agile community with weekly gatherings to share ways of working.
Intro to Theory Of Contraints (TOC)
In 2002 I met my TOC mentor on a Life Coaching programme 🔗. Eversince then I have been facinated by TOC, but unable to find any decent TOC work, I continued down my Agile career path.
Agile Career
As a freelance consultant I’ve now worked in multiple programmes and organisations, usally with multiple teams, from multiple suppliers, often globally distributed with technical practices from brilliant to poor! Applying TOC where possible.
