Introduction
Hello and welcome to my personal site! My name is Philip Jani and I currently serve as a scrum master for QVC. The reason I started this blog is to track my journey as a scrum master and to share what I learn with other scrum masters as well as software engineers, product owners and anyone else that has to work within an agile context or is interested in learning more about agile in practice.
A Forthcoming Decade of History
Scrum is an iterative, incremental and empirical approach to managing and creating products in a “complex” environment where the requirements are usually not fully understood before work begins and is often subject to change due to changing market conditions or newly acquired information.
In many ways, life is comparably complex and requires constant iteration with the aid of constant transparency, inspection and adaptation in order to arrive at a final product that we are satisfied with.
What follows is a decade long series of iterations and incremental improvements that have helped shape the “product” I’ve become today. The journey thus far has required it’s fair share of transparency, inspection and adaptation. The cycle of continuous improvement is analogous to life itself.
2012 - Depressed
After being expelled from high school in my senior year, I moved in with my father in Northeast Philadelphia and graduated high school in June 2012 from Abraham Lincoln High School. Before and after finishing high school, I had struggled with severe clinical depression for many years and I had no direction for what I wanted to do for a living. I just knew that I didn’t want to go to college (waste of money, waste of time, Google existed).
2013-2014 - Depressed and Directionless
I lived with my dad for a few years after high school working part-time as a delivery driver for Pizza Hut with no real direction or progress in life. I went to school for Polysomnography but never completed the required work hours for my license, considered the idea of being a dental hygienist for a short period of time and studied audio engineering, PC troubleshooting, HTML, CSS, Javascript frameworks (jQuery, Angular, etc.). I was not truly interested in any of these things, just wanted to get my parents off my back about finding a job. I was so burnt out from school and my negative family life that I really just wanted to do nothing but stay up until 6:30am everyday, sleep 12 hours a day, wake up at 6:30pm every evening, watch YouTube videos until 6:30am and do it all over until I died.
By December of 2014, my dad was fed up with my complete lack of direction in life and told me that I would have to leave and figure out what to do with myself. I didn’t know what to do, since I lost my job at Pizza Hut in September of 2014 but I decided that I would move to Austin, Texas before the start of the new year since I knew some people out that way and could probably stay with them for a short time while I found a job and got on my feet.
2015 - Depressed, Directionless and Homeless
By the start of the new year, I had made my plans to move to Austin, Texas and already had a job interview lined up with HostGator. On January 3rd, 2015, I drove roughly 1800 miles, over one and a half days and across nine states before I ended up in Austin.
I moved in with an old friend who owned his own house and spent four months sleeping on his couch. In the mean time, I ended up getting the job with HostGator, losing the job with HostGator and getting kicked off my friend’s couch. After this, I ended up saving a bit of money to put down first and last months rent to rent out a spare bedroom in an old lady’s house in Round Rock, Texas.
What followed was a few more months of loneliness, depression and chain smoking packs of cigarettes at 4am while listening to The Devil Wears Prada on my iPhone while managing to get and lose more jobs around the Austin, Texas area. Eventually, my instability with maintaining gainful employment caused my new landlord to kick me from the bedroom I was renting in her house which forced me to live out of my car.
I spent the winter trying to sleep in my car, I spent a night in someone’s boat docked at the marina, got kicked out of a grocery store for trying to stay out of the cold and bought a Planet Fitness membership to have a place to shower and a place to help me stay out of the cold.
Being homeless was an experience that really shows you what society thinks of the homeless. They are essentially considered “human litter” that are considered unsightly and the sight of which is not appreciated in public spaces.
2016-2017 - Building a Foundation
By 2016, I had moved back in with my father in Philadelphia but couldn’t go back to the directionless way that I had been going for the past five years. I still didn’t know what I wanted to do but I had “cracked” and said, “screw it, I’ll just go to college.” I knew that going to community college would at least buy me two to four years of time to figure out what I was going to work for. I went to community college for an Associates degree in Computer Information Systems. Compared to homelessness, community college felt very easy and I chose to work very hard to maintain housing during this time. Homelessness became arguably the most formative experience of my life and made me really appreciate stability and many things I took for granted previously (housing, clothing, food, warm showers, etc.). During this time I was living off food stamps and paying $450 a month for a small bedroom in a less than ideal part of town using my student loan refund checks that I would receive each semester I stayed in community college.
2018-2019 - Strengthening the Foundation
During this time, I had begun taking classes at Kutztown University for a Bachelors degree in Information Technology. I also got a contract job working at a managed service provider, providing technical support, network troubleshooting and network installations for clients across New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Delaware. Most days, I would 12+ hour days. My longest day at this job started at 8am and ended at 2am. I was back at work by 8am. After the contract ended, I ended up being hired there full-time and making enough money to put a down-payment on my current home. In a matter of three to four years, I went from living in my car to living in a five bedroom, one and a half bathroom, 2200 square foot home. I had worked very hard up to this point to relentlessly earn what I now had and I didn’t take it for granted.
2020-2021 - Cementing the Foundation
By 2020, I had completed my Associates degree and was continuing to finish my Bachelors degree at Kutztown University. Even up to this point, I remained unconvinced as to what I wanted to do for a career. Despite majoring in Information Technology, I knew how to code but did not enjoy it very much at all. Around this time, I had been introduced to the concept of Scrum by a family friend. I decided to do some research on the topic and realized this sounded like something that not only, could I do, but that I would authentically enjoy doing. In short order, I had attended my CSM course, took my test and was a Certified Scrum Master! By the summer of 2021, I had successfully landed an internship with Bankers Healthcare Group. I gained valuable experience as the scrum master for three different data teams at a large financial company during the summer and it proved to be a very productive experience that I am proud to display on my resume.
In December of 2021, I had finally earned my Bachelors degree in Information Technology with a minor in Business Administration from Kutztown University.
2022 - A Long Ten Years
In 2022, I had accepted a job offer to work for a consultancy shortly after graduating from university. This consultancy had landed me work with their client, QVC. I have spent the entire year working at QVC and am thoroughly enjoying my time thus far! I help to lead development efforts of QVC's Roku streaming application and I am applying my knowledge of Scrum principles to help the team deliver value early and often for QVC’s customers and stakeholders as well as helping the team to find ways to continuously improve.
Scrum has really helped give me purpose and direction in life which I needed desperately!