Driven by an insatiable curiosity to understand how things work, I've spent my entire life taking things apart and reading just to answer the age old question of "why?". I knew I wanted to understand and build things before I even had a word for it, so you could say that engineering was a natural fit.Growing up, I was always told the best engineers worked on and had to repair products they designed. This prompted me to spend some extra time in school and the military to obtain the skill sets common among Electronics / Mechanical Technicians. As a result, I vowed to never be the person to put the oil filter in a literally unreachable spot. Fast forward to today, as an Embedded Software Engineer I get to spend my days understanding how things work and then actually building them. I am able to leverage more than just my 4 year degree regarding the physics and behavior of the electrical circuits, however. Having assembled, troubleshot, and repaired PCBs/circuit cards, I see board bring ups as fun challenges. Two semesters studying and writing Lattice Boltzmann fluid simulations make thermal management and C/C++ less mysterious. My brief foray into Journalism taught me the necessity of intelligible documentation and clear communication. Finally, my time in the Air Force has taught me invaluable lessons about how to work with people, what makes an effective leader, and to have a sense of humor to get you through the worst.My curiosity of the world extends into my free time. When I'm not upgrading something in my 100+ year old home, I'm tinkering with my 3D printer, writing a little code to model an idea I've had, buying and programing yet another micro-controller, fiddling with a camera (film and digital), setting up small RF sensor networks, configuring and maintaining Linux on a few servers because "the cloud" is overrated, dabbling with some machine learning libraries to justify my new graphics card, and most importantly, taking my dog for a walk on a nice day.