Childhood
I grew up in the suburbs of Athens, in an apartment above my grandfather’s furniture factory. My grandfather was an orphan. He patented a sofa-bed design and built the business around it.
When my mother was away, my grandmother looked after me. I spent my afternoons on the workbenches with thread and offcuts of wood, watching the workers cut, assemble, and repair. It was my first look at how a product gets made: one small, careful step after another.
First Computer
As a kid I drew, played music, and built with LEGO. I took most of my toys apart to see how they worked.
My parents bought me a computer in my first year of junior high. I played a few games, but I spent more time in Quick Basic, writing calculators and text adventures. The first time a program did exactly what I had planned, I was hooked.
In high school, my studies came first. In my spare time I wrote Windows Forms applications. I abandoned most of them, and each one taught me something.
College Years
I studied Computer Science at the Technological Institute of Athens. For the first time, I was surrounded by people who thought the way I did.
Theory alone did not hold my attention. I spent more time on practical work: PHP sites, early Joomla projects, software that real people used. The degree took me seven years, and I spent most of them building things.
In my third year, a team of classmates and I placed third in a nationwide Microsoft innovation competition. Our project used QR codes to reward people for recycling. The result gave me confidence when I needed it, and it made me a Microsoft Student Partner.
Soon after, a professor hired me to refactor a tourism accommodation application. The refactor turned into a full rewrite. For my thesis, I built a bill payment system on Windows Mobile that used QR codes.
First Company
After I left that job, I finished my remaining courses in one year. During my military service, I started a company with my two friends from the Microsoft competition.
Our first product managed customers and shared expenses for apartment buildings. Progress was slow. Customers adopted it, and it stayed in production for more than ten years.
Day Jobs
The product worked, but it could not pay three salaries. All three of us took day jobs. I joined a software company and learned to work with structure, deadlines, and a team that depended on me. In the evenings and on weekends, we kept building our own product.
Through that job, we took on an Android tablet application as outside contractors. It went well. We rented an office and went back to our company full-time.
Rise and Fall
A new client hired us to build a full suite of applications. We hired people and moved to a larger office.
By our fifth year, that one client brought in most of our revenue. Then they ran into financial trouble and ended the partnership. We had delivered two projects. The third never started. Debts grew faster than new work came in, and we closed the company.
Recovery
I gave myself one year to pay off my debts. I joined a small fintech startup that paid less but had a strong engineering culture. I cleared the debts within that year.
I was one of the first engineers on its product and worked on it until it became a global platform. Later I was promoted to lead the engineering team. When the company closed, I left on good terms and spent six months with my family.
Today
In my free time, I had been building an AI-based news analysis tool as an experiment with language models.
People I had worked with at previous startups asked me to help build a new fintech product. I am now Head of Engineering. We build e-commerce, rewards, and affiliate platforms for financial communities.
How I Work
I have worked on most parts of software, from sales calls to infrastructure. That makes me a generalist. I want to understand a system before I change it.
I prefer deliberate work over quick fixes. In an early product, fast code is often the right call, because the goal is to learn.
My first company taught me the hardest lesson. We let one client become most of our revenue, and when they left, the company went with them. A single large client is a risk even when they are happy and paying. I now look for single points of failure in a business the same way I look for them in a system.