This document summarizes a data engineering project for analyzing trending topics by geo-location in 3 sentences or less: The project involves building a pipeline to ingest real-time social media data from Kafka into HDFS for batch processing with Spark and storing results in Cassandra, with the goal of exposing trending hashtag data via a web API. Some initial components including a simple Flask API are complete, while work remains on real-time streaming, a NoSQL database interface, and fully configuring the cluster. The presenter has a computer science degree and experience as a software engineer at Citrix and a university research center.