A Little About Me

I originally grew up in the Great State of Tennessee. I have two adult children, whom I love very much. I have a beautiful wife that I married in 2020, who I am thrilled to be sharing my life and love with. We have two wacky cats. I found back in 2018 that I love riding motorcycles, a love which I was thrilled that my wife got into and now shares with me.

Now, to a little about my varied career. After high school, I joined the United States Navy, where I worked as an electronic and mechanical technician and in various military middle-management positions. I even did a few years doing some military Law Enforcement duty.

After ten years as a Sailor, I decided to move on and pursue an early love of Science by studying Biology and Chemistry, earning my Bachelor of Science at Austin Peay State University. Nope, that's not in Texas, it's in Clarksville, Tennessee. Austin Peay was a Tennessee Governor decades ago, in case you're curious.

After that, I worked for about three years in a Molecular Biology-focused Cancer research laboratory as a Staff Research Assistant, performing experiments involving mostly Kidney and Prostate cancers. In this position, I co-authored four articles in various peer-reviewed research journals.

Next in my roller coaster of a career, my Chemistry Minor, opened the door to how I ended up where I am now. I joined my current employer, a multi-national manufacturer of polymer-based products, as a Quality Assurance professional, helping to ensure top-notch product always got to our customers.

It's here that I ran across the wonderful world of code. The Quality Assurance Group had, over many years, developed a vast array of Microsoft Excel based "programs" for everything from reporting, product-testing control, process controls and anything else you might think of. Over time, I became fascinated by the use and abuse of the Visual Basic for Applications that our Engineers had used to push these poor, not-so-little workbooks WAY past Microsoft's Excel dreams.

This fascination led me to eventually look for ways to make MY, and by extension my colleagues, lives easier by developing new "programs" in Excel, ultimately teaching myself extensive VBA syntax and techniques. My growth in this area led to my being recruited into the IT Group, after some departmental restructuring led to responsibility for these Excel "programs" being shifted to IT. Over time, I decided to move beyond the limitations, over-complexity and instability of these Excel tools and taught myself Visual Basic.Net and began to develop stand-alone applications for new processes or to upgrade and replace legacy Excel "programs".

After developing several solid programs using Visual Basic, I faced the reality that C# appears to be the future of the .Net world, with most resources, for documentation and ongoing training, to be found there, so I taught, and continue to teach, myself C#. I still maintain and modify my older VB.Net applications and have shifted my primary development to C#.