About Me

My name is Vincent Monteleone. I’m currently working as a Software Engineer Senior Analyst. I graduated from St. John’s University in May 2021. Starting college, I had no prior experience in programming and chose the major because I’d always played around with the hardware on my desktop at home, upgrading and swapping components to better my PC. I knew I’d always had a knack for understanding computers at a face level, but I wanted to understand how the computer spoke to itself. More so, how programs communicate with my computer. At St. John’s, when I was a freshman, Java was the only language taught. I told myself I’d commit all my time to learning the fundamentals of the language because then I could extend into whatever language thereafter, whatever language is best fit for my passion, so I did just that. After the first year of college wrapped up, all my ‘hello world’ programs beside me, I realized that the field I was heading into wasn’t going to provide me with a job, it was providing me a vocation. I was enthusiastic about what I was doing and that was important to me. However, I wasn’t sold on the Java programming language. Sure, I understand it’s benefits very well with every professor stressing them, but some of the projects I had in mind seemed complicated to implement in the language. I asked around, upper-classmen and professors, about learning outlets in getting started. The answer was prevalent, I should learn Python. Python was easily adaptable after spending so much time in the land of the JVM, and I was enjoying how idiomatic the language is. My ideas seemed to roll right from my mind into the code with ease. With the fundamentals of this new language under my belt, I sought to finally implementing my projects to code. This of course generated the necessity for libraries and APIs, teaching me the value of proper code documentation. I forged on towards my goals and some of my favorite projects can be seen on the ‘Projects’ page . Reflecting on why I like to code so much, I realized something that the greatest programmers I know share in common: programming is art. Someone with an affinity to produce art makes a great coder; the file is a canvas, waiting for the programmer to stroke their code as they see fit to create a beautiful work (albeit with more stringency than a paint brush). In my free time, I enjoy writing as well as drawing and painting. Some of my writings can be seen on the ‘Writings’ page. I hope to expand my knowledge not only in Python, but other languages in time to come. In fact, this website serves as one of my learning experiences itself. Prior to this site, I had no experience in web development. Not only lacking knowledge in web frameworks, but in base HTML! My cousin left me a book from 2012, going into the basics of HTML and CSS. I committed myself to learning the book from front to back and by the end I was efficient in both languages. Once I had these tools learned, I needed a framework to run the site. I remember a friend of mine raving about the Flask framework for Python. Python being my most comfortable language, I decided to learn the ins and outs. I followed the remarkable tutorial series made by Corey Schaefer in making a website with Flask. I can’t stress my appreciation for how approachable Corey’s series was, thank you. When I finished the series, I got to working on this very website as a portfolio for myself, a sort of CV. Changes to the project can be seen on my GitHub (linked through image above) and I get great joy in reflecting on the stages of progress I’ve made from start to finish. I hope my projects serve as learning tools or at least as inspiration for young programmers to pursue their passions. I have one piece of advice for those starting off to keep in mind: any passion you want to make a reality is infinitely possible thanks to the learning tool that is the internet, the only obstacle stopping you is yourself.