I am a long-time enthusiast programmer and software engineer/designer/architect currently working on private sector and government contract projects at Vertical Knowledge, LLC. Previously, I worked for RELx/Reed Elsevier Group as a Java/Scala data integration engineer in the Spark/Hadoop space during my time at NVISIA, LLC in Chicago. I began my journey at age 11 with VB6 and VB.NET. My interests and past projects span things such as game development (high-level scripting down to writing my own OpenGL/DirectX rendering engine, and contributing to the Leadwerks Game Engine, CryEngine, and UDK), general utility framework development and personal/enterprise software applications design/development, web design and UI/UX specialization, music product & sound design, electrical engineering (prototyping gadgets, but mostly reverse engineering circuits and breaking things that use electricity), building computers for all types of specialized purposes, trying to understand global economics (my college major), starting a new business every few years trying to be the next Warren Buffet, Bill Gates, or Mark Cuban. My newest interest and passion is big data and the analytics behind it. My day job involves building the world`s largest analytics-friendly product database for web and mobile applications, B2C & B2B business applications, and social networking. Hoping to make the world a better place. I`ve came to stackoverflow for years now, feeding off answered questions to improve my own code or solve issues I was too lazy to ask questions about, but as of 2015 that has ended, and I now frequent here to give back more than I have taken, whiel continuing to broaden my knowledge and find answers to pesky programming conundrums that are mainly due lack of reading documentation, following zen principles, or coding while asleep. ©