CV
Personal Information:
Full name: Giannis Tsakiris
Birth date: December 30th, 1976
Location: Athens, Greece
Education:
I graduated from high school on 1994 with a grade of 16.5 (out of 20). On 1995 I participated for second time in the competition for admission to tertiary education institutes, and my grades allowed me to be accepted at the Technological Education Institute of Heraklion, to study electrical engineering. After a couple of years I dumped the electrical engineering school to completely devote myself to work. Currently I study computer science in the Greek Open University. Since my physical presence is not required there, I believe there will be no conflicts with work this time.
Languages:
I speak Greek as my native language. I also speak English pretty well, but I think I can always improve. And to satisfy your curiosity: No, I didn't pass the FCE exam. I failed it. Twice.
Early computer years:
I took my first steps with computers at the age of 7 on my brother's TI-99/4A home computer. It was my first contact with computer programming and the BASIC programming language. I was amazed by the fact that you could actually tell the machine what to do and how to do it.
After a couple of years a Commodore 64 came into the house. Now this one could make you go wow! Incredible graphics and sound quality, way to faster, more RAM, uglier BASIC. I was having the time of my life, learning and coding. I remember that afternoon just like yesterday, when this thought crossed my mind: This is what I want to do for all my life.
At the age of 12 my father got me my first PC compatible with a 8088 CPU and 640KiB of RAM. At first it was disappointing. No more astonishing games, graphics and sound effects. Only black and white pixels and blip-blops. But a lot of good things came out of this. I spend almost 5 years learning and coding with Turbo Pascal 5.5, and forever abandoned the childish BASIC language. I dealt with almost every aspect of computer programming and wrote literally millions of lines of code. I also learned some 8088 assembly and some Turbo Prolog. Electronics and circuits was my other beloved concern at those times.
Later computer years:
As a grown up, and as a student of Electrical Engineering I had to use my school's old Sun systems. That was my first contact with UNIX-like systems and I loved it. Absence of pascal compiler encouraged me to start learning the C programming language in which I discovered the true programming beauty. A good friend of mine helped me to install Slackware 3.2 on my 386/40DX PC and I started getting to know this miraculous operating system.
The "pro" years:
My first job was back at 1998 when me and my friend Mark were hired as part-time system administrator's assistants by the Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics, FORTH. I mostly had to deal with software installation, applying security fixes and patches and taking backups on the computers of the institute. I stayed there until the agreed period expired, which was 18 months.
At about the same time, me and Mark also accepted a project from the Institute of Computer Science, FORTH. The project was about providing full multilingual support in a variety of different platforms. It took us 4 months to come up with a complete solution for typing, displaying on screen and printing on paper, a variety of languages, including Ancient Greek, Turkish and Arabic, on a variety of platforms, including Microsoft Windows 95/98, IBM AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, SunOS and GNU/Linux (on the UNIX systems we provided separate solutions for the X Window System and console).
My first real full-time job was on February of 1999, when I worked as PC technician in Ergosystems s.a., a small company at Heraklion, Crete. I didn't like this job mostly because I had to constantly travel from client to client to provide in-house support. I quitted in 4 months.
Next came my first "big" deal. On July of 1999 I was hired by Phaistos Networks s.a., to work mostly as a web developer. There I had the chance to contribute to the Pathfinder award-winning portal, and a lot of other successful projects like the ADMAN™ ad management platform. Those days I mostly worked with C/C++, PHP and MySQL. I quitted from Phaistos by the end of 2002 when I had to do my military service.
I returned from the army on summer of 2003. Then I moved to Athens and found a job as an application developer in a small company by the name Incepta s.a. There I mostly did application development using Visual C++. By the end of 2003 the company shut itself down and I was laid-off.
I didn't had the chance to enjoy my lack of job, because in less than two weeks I hired by Lambrakis Press s.a. In there I was introduced in a competitive working environment. I learned lots of new technologies I never had the chance to know before (Active Server Pages, XML/XSLT, .NET, SQL Server and Oracle are some of them). Amongst my job's obligations was to support certain sections of the in.gr portal. In less than 2 years I quited because I was offered a better job.
Since the December of 2005 I work as a software engineer in IST s.a. The company's projects are both .NET and Java oriented. For the first two years as an IST's worker I provided my services for WIND Hellas. Currently I have been taken to Eurobank EFG were I'm employed as an external collaborator, to help them with their e-banking system.
Full name: Giannis Tsakiris
Birth date: December 30th, 1976
Location: Athens, Greece
Education:
I graduated from high school on 1994 with a grade of 16.5 (out of 20). On 1995 I participated for second time in the competition for admission to tertiary education institutes, and my grades allowed me to be accepted at the Technological Education Institute of Heraklion, to study electrical engineering. After a couple of years I dumped the electrical engineering school to completely devote myself to work. Currently I study computer science in the Greek Open University. Since my physical presence is not required there, I believe there will be no conflicts with work this time.
Languages:
I speak Greek as my native language. I also speak English pretty well, but I think I can always improve. And to satisfy your curiosity: No, I didn't pass the FCE exam. I failed it. Twice.
Early computer years:
I took my first steps with computers at the age of 7 on my brother's TI-99/4A home computer. It was my first contact with computer programming and the BASIC programming language. I was amazed by the fact that you could actually tell the machine what to do and how to do it.
After a couple of years a Commodore 64 came into the house. Now this one could make you go wow! Incredible graphics and sound quality, way to faster, more RAM, uglier BASIC. I was having the time of my life, learning and coding. I remember that afternoon just like yesterday, when this thought crossed my mind: This is what I want to do for all my life.
At the age of 12 my father got me my first PC compatible with a 8088 CPU and 640KiB of RAM. At first it was disappointing. No more astonishing games, graphics and sound effects. Only black and white pixels and blip-blops. But a lot of good things came out of this. I spend almost 5 years learning and coding with Turbo Pascal 5.5, and forever abandoned the childish BASIC language. I dealt with almost every aspect of computer programming and wrote literally millions of lines of code. I also learned some 8088 assembly and some Turbo Prolog. Electronics and circuits was my other beloved concern at those times.
Later computer years:
As a grown up, and as a student of Electrical Engineering I had to use my school's old Sun systems. That was my first contact with UNIX-like systems and I loved it. Absence of pascal compiler encouraged me to start learning the C programming language in which I discovered the true programming beauty. A good friend of mine helped me to install Slackware 3.2 on my 386/40DX PC and I started getting to know this miraculous operating system.
The "pro" years:
My first job was back at 1998 when me and my friend Mark were hired as part-time system administrator's assistants by the Institute of Applied and Computational Mathematics, FORTH. I mostly had to deal with software installation, applying security fixes and patches and taking backups on the computers of the institute. I stayed there until the agreed period expired, which was 18 months.
At about the same time, me and Mark also accepted a project from the Institute of Computer Science, FORTH. The project was about providing full multilingual support in a variety of different platforms. It took us 4 months to come up with a complete solution for typing, displaying on screen and printing on paper, a variety of languages, including Ancient Greek, Turkish and Arabic, on a variety of platforms, including Microsoft Windows 95/98, IBM AIX, HP-UX, IRIX, SunOS and GNU/Linux (on the UNIX systems we provided separate solutions for the X Window System and console).
My first real full-time job was on February of 1999, when I worked as PC technician in Ergosystems s.a., a small company at Heraklion, Crete. I didn't like this job mostly because I had to constantly travel from client to client to provide in-house support. I quitted in 4 months.
Next came my first "big" deal. On July of 1999 I was hired by Phaistos Networks s.a., to work mostly as a web developer. There I had the chance to contribute to the Pathfinder award-winning portal, and a lot of other successful projects like the ADMAN™ ad management platform. Those days I mostly worked with C/C++, PHP and MySQL. I quitted from Phaistos by the end of 2002 when I had to do my military service.
I returned from the army on summer of 2003. Then I moved to Athens and found a job as an application developer in a small company by the name Incepta s.a. There I mostly did application development using Visual C++. By the end of 2003 the company shut itself down and I was laid-off.
I didn't had the chance to enjoy my lack of job, because in less than two weeks I hired by Lambrakis Press s.a. In there I was introduced in a competitive working environment. I learned lots of new technologies I never had the chance to know before (Active Server Pages, XML/XSLT, .NET, SQL Server and Oracle are some of them). Amongst my job's obligations was to support certain sections of the in.gr portal. In less than 2 years I quited because I was offered a better job.
Since the December of 2005 I work as a software engineer in IST s.a. The company's projects are both .NET and Java oriented. For the first two years as an IST's worker I provided my services for WIND Hellas. Currently I have been taken to Eurobank EFG were I'm employed as an external collaborator, to help them with their e-banking system.