Backend systems,
distributed software,
and cloud infrastructure.

I was born and raised in Peristeri, Athens, and my first real encounter with technology wasn’t a programming language. It was a PlayStation 2. I loved the games, but even while playing, another question kept coming back: how is all of this actually built, and what is happening behind the screen?

At around twelve, an old desktop PC and an internet connection opened up a much larger world. I bought computer magazines, read the computer science books we had at school, spent hours on W3Schools and made my first attempts at building web pages. I experimented constantly with PCs and laptops too, changing things, breaking them, fixing them and learning by trying.

Somewhere in those years, computing stopped being something I was simply interested in and became a deliberate direction. I chose the informatics track at school and sat the national university entrance exams with one clear goal: to study computer science.

University changed how I understood the field. The first two years were far more demanding than I had imagined, and that made computer science more compelling, not less. I enjoy difficult problems, particularly the point where something that first seems opaque begins to show its structure.

Two courses, DevOps and Computer Architecture, deepened that curiosity from opposite ends. DevOps showed me how source code becomes a system that is built, deployed, automated and operated. Computer Architecture went below the abstractions software relies on, closer to what the hardware itself is doing.

I want to understand before I implement.

I’m analytical and persistent, and I enjoy working as part of a team. When something doesn’t make sense to me yet, I find it hard to leave it unexamined. Knowing that something works is not enough: I want to know why it works, what it assumes, where its limits are and how it fits into the wider system.

Not everything I value from university shows up in a transcript. Anastasia Zerva and I have worked together since our first year, across assignments and projects. Over time, that grew into a long-term, research-oriented collaboration built on trust, complementary ways of thinking and a shared ambition to keep exploring difficult problems together.

Today I don’t want to define myself by a single technology or one corner of computer science. My interests range widely, but the aim stays the same: to contribute through my work, to apply what I understand to real problems people face, and to build things that are useful in practice.

Outside computer science, I make time for friends and family, and I read regularly about economics, investing and entrepreneurship — other ways of thinking about systems, decisions and how value is created.