Spark notes:

• I grew up in the Midwest. We didn't have much, but we did alright. Most importantly, I had plenty of love and support, and I never went hungry.

• In high-school, I sat first chair trumpet, and received two state pins in soccer and diving. 

• I lived in Miami for a year where I studied, became a certified sailor, and spent most of my weekends in the keys. 

• I transferred to Illinois State University where I studied finance and dreamed of working with equity portfolios and creating financial models. While I was there, I met a beautiful girl from Austria who is now my wife and best friend. 

• While working at Ascensus, I taught myself to code and fell in love with optimizing processes. 

• I changed my trajectory to follow what I like to think of as the "logical path", and began the long haul of filling in educational gaps in computer science. This culminated in the pursuit of my masters from the University of Illinois. 

• My wife and I lived in the UAE, where I became a coding hermit inside an air conditioned box, and adopted some cats which we named Billy, Beans, Burrito and Schnoogens.

• I currently consider myself a digital nomad of sorts, I do mix of devops, data science and software work, read philosophy, and attempt to keep the existential dread at bay.

If you actually took the time to digest the above: 

I like to think I have a pretty decent creativity multiplier and learning speed, so based on the given task and my prior knowledge on the subject, I'm usually confident I can close any knowledge gaps to accomplish an objective in a performant amount of time (of course, given enough motivation)

Not exactly peer reviewed science, but generally not a bad metric.