Joseph De Lisa

Hello World

I started college as an open option engineering major, which meant I was in the unique position of getting to try a little bit of everything. I remember sitting down in CSCI 1300 for the first time. Opening up VS Code and writing my first line of C++. When I ran it (and it finally worked) that was it. I fell in love with coding, with the ability of creation.

cout << "Hello World" << endl;
$ ./hello
Hello World

Solving Problems

That year my hunger to learn continued to grow. I learned enough in order to have an internship after my freshman year. The senior developer there taught me the importance of quality code, unit tests, and creativity. It was the first time on my path that I realized not only did I love to create, I was good at it.

It was also then, that I learned that being good at coding has little to do with the language you write in. Instead, it was all about being good at solving problems.

Room to fail

My sophomore year summer, I felt the thrill of creating again, like I could build anything. This is when I first started automating small tasks. Saving a company time means saving it money, and that kind of work gets noticed. The job pulled me out of my "I can't fail" shell, and showed me what was possible.

Bigger than code

When I first heard about an internship in Barcelona, I couldn't believe it was real. However, unlike previous experiences, the most important thing I learned there was not about software engineering. It was about life. I can't fully explain it, but I became a different person. I no longer cared about being right all the time, instead my mind shifted to caring more about what made people unique. I realized life is not about work, it's about loving other people. I no longer wanted to just sit behind a computer and grind, I wanted a career with people at the center of it.