An amateur coder who took my then very crude skills to a manufacturing job 21 years ago at $7.25 an hour. I demonstrated the efficacy and utility of Visual Basic in the industrial environment and eventually built my own internal career track developing a grab-bag of time/labor saving applications around MS Office. They included proprietary, stand-alone VB6 applications for running machine testing and data collection and analysis systems and ultimately, a network based suite of remote data interface application built around a combination of OPC/SQL/Excel/VB6 tools providing 'Big-Data' collection and analysis that revolutionized the company's manufacturing productivity as well as providing remote read/write interface capability to manufacturing robots and test cells throughout the factory.