About Me — Davide Pollicino

23 Years old software Engineer @Microsoft, Mentor @MentorCruise, Technical Writer @Medium Engineering, ex tech Lead @NdWebSolutions.

Old picture of me (now my hair have grown back, lol)

Origins

Born in Sicily, Italy. I Moved to Edinburgh, United Kingdom, when I was 19 to start a Bachelor in Computer Science at Edinburgh Napier University. The last several generations of my family have been managing and running bakeries in Palermo.

Pollicinos’ family has origin from Genova, Italy, and between the XIII al XVI century, they were barons in Messina (Sicily). Below you can find what seems to be the Coat of arms of the Pollicino.

Coat of arms of the Pollicino family.

The family business

My parents and relatives were busy running our bakeries, and as I wished to spend more time with them, and help them, any moment outside of school and study time, was spent in their workplace.

I was learning how manage clients, how business goes well or not, how to interact with others, and most importantly, how to see any expense as an investment. I was educated to live a frugal life. I have been shown how to spend money just for getting more money, or to build memories, ignore fashion trends, or resisting the temptation to have the latest iPhone model.

Long term side effect: everyone around me at my age is broke (or close to be broke, meaning that they are not able to live few months maintaing the same lifestyle if they will loose their job today), while I have few digits in my bank account. Guess what… whatsapp and instagram works also in my smartphone.

Picture taken from Joana Carneiro

Education

I studied at the ITIS Vittorio Emanuele III seconday high school (following the specializazion in IT & Telecommunication). There, a part from getting the very basics of coding, system design and first experience to work in team, I had the chance to attend the competitive Programming Olympics in a team. This experience gives me the first introduction to data-structures…