A first and personal article.

This is the first article I have ever published to medium. Actually, the first article I have ever published in general. I have long wanted to start for mainly two reasons. Firstly, to exercise and get better at bringing the jumble of thoughts bouncing through my brain into a flowing, coherent and enjoyable story. Secondly, and equally importantly, these articles should document the journeys I have embarked on as well as the lessons I have discovered along the way.

As an engineer at heart, I assumed there would be an ideal approach to starting, yet even after much consideration and research, I have not been able to settle on one. Therefore, I have accepted for myself that there is no perfect time, perfect topic, or perfect approach. Consequently, I decided to just start, figuring out the remaining questions along the way (what a cliche, I know).

This first article will be more of a personal piece, a semi-complete documentation of my journey so far and some of my current thoughts, shedding light on my past experiences and laying the foundation for understanding who I am. If you are not interested in who I am as a person per se, but would instead like to learn about some of the more technical and applicable lessons I have picked up along the way, I would advise you to stop reading here and instead wait as in the following articles I plan to go further in-depth with these particular topics. However, if reading entertains you, or if you want to get to know me (which would be quite flattering), let me start with an introduction to who I am as a human to give you a bit of context for the story to come.

Hello world, my name is Enrico Bertolotti, a 22 year-old currently living in Germany. Officially I am half German, half Italian; however, I also identify as part American as I grew up there for the first half of my life. I am proud to call myself a recent graduate from the Advanced Technology Program at the University of Twente (Netherlands). However, my skill sets and hobbies reach further than just technology.

Two main factors dictate whether something becomes a passion for me. Firstly, there has to be the possibility to help people. Assisting and empowering people gives me a significant amount of energy and joy.

In general, I am a person that gets easily excited and curious about almost any topic and likes to dive deeper into it. Some of this excitement has stuck around and become a hobby or even a passion whilst the rest has slowly faded. Here is a categorised list of the passions that have emerged and survived, sorted from most prominent to least:

In general, all technology — no matter if past, present or future — excites me (a big reason behind why I chose such a broad bachelors program). Everything from big trending topics down to the small — yet still impactful — are of interest to me.

As a young boy I was constantly surrounded by science. My father is an engineer with a deep love for science, which led to many discussions about the world from a very systematic and analytical point of view. I loved being explained the “why”, “how”, and “what”-based questions I had about my observable surroundings. This fundamentally shaped how I think and view the world and has led me down a more science-oriented path for the better part of my life.

I started out my bachelor in engineering and then halfway found a love for computer science and thus promptly made it the subject of my minor and my bachelor thesis. Ever since I discovered this field for myself, I just couldn’t step away.

The fact that you could build solutions that help and empower a large number of people with little to no capital investment was incredibly motivating for me. You could build, try out, fail, fix and improve at a breakneck pace, sometimes all within a day. The pinnacle for me in this field is web development, an ever-evolving and rapidly shifting landscape of easily accessible technology, constantly changing and improving in the background while remaining highly performant and accessible for the end-user.

Currently I am looking more and more into more accessible and high-performance web technologies:

My passion for good and beautiful design started long ago, far before the start of my study. I remember how much time I spent in high school carefully crafting a presentation to make sure it sent the right message, or spending time learning LaTex to write the final assignment of my astronomy course (in my opinion, nothing beats the gorgeous typeface and spacing of the LaTex render engine).

I believe my willingness to dedicate time and effort to beautiful and emotion-based design made me quite unique later on in my bachelor, where next to solving and designing engineering-based solutions, I also focused on making sure these solutions, as well as their presentation, were beautiful and elegant.

As my time at University went on my urge to create media grew stronger and stronger, so I decided to take a module (equal half of a semester) off to satisfy this growing creative drive. I consequently registered for self-employment, paused my university courses and got to work with clients such as the municipality of Enschede and the University itself, creating videos and photographing events, designing flyers, posters, and various other media. I enjoyed my time immensely, and even after this creative sabbatical I continued to work in the creative field next to my study. I have been applying this balance between creative design and engineering problem solving to this day, as for me, this was and still is the perfect match.

In my penultimate year of my bachelor I started a project at the University of Twente called the Digital Workshop, a physical space that students could use to experiment and explore with digital media such as photography, videography, design and more. However, detailing the story of this project is a whole article in itself, so if interested, keep an eye out for it!

These have been some of the core experiences that have moulded my creative passion into what it is today. I’ll leave it at this for the sake of brevity and save the details for other stories.

As a note in advance: I would not consider myself to be a philosopher or claim to have any in-depth knowledge about the field of philosophy of any kind. However, I do spend a sizeable chunk of my free time thinking and participating in discussions analysing patterns between people and behaviours they exhume, going down the rabbit-hole of the simple question “why?”, as well as reflecting upon my own actions and patterns of thought.

Thinking about the actions and reactions of the people in my life as well myself has led to a certain level of clarity when navigating my own emotions and decisions, a skill I value greatly and has fundamentally changed the way I perceive the world and act — hopefully for the better.

For example, during my time at University I shared a house with an incredibly international bunch of students. A lot of different nationalities were represented, some local, some European and some quite international. A diverse mix of cultures. This led to some fascinating discussions at the dinner table and really opened my eyes to how many different ways there are to interpret the same event based on personal factors, values and experiences. This made me realise something: By assuming anything about a situation — or in other words projecting ones own experiences, values, moral framework etc. onto a situation — one runs the risk of completely misinterpreting the situation, which in the best case, could lead to missing a potentially valuable learning experience, and in the worst case can deeply hurt someone.

There are many more eye-opening moments I have experienced so far and I hope there are many more yet to come. I hope by sharing these they can bring someone — maybe even you — some perspective or value in life. Hopefully I can get around to documenting some of these in the coming weeks and months.

If you made it this far, you must either be entertained by my writing style or really enjoy learning about me and my view on things. Either way, I’m grateful that you took the time and I hoped you enjoyed my first attempt at writing an article.

I truly enjoyed the process, and am excited for the stories yet to come that I can share with the world!

— Enrico Bertolotti

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