Hi, my name is George Stefanis 👋

A few months ago a colleague posted in a channel on Slack that she found a book on management in her laundry room. This is New York where having your own washing machine in your flat/apartment is the ultimate luxury. That book was unhinged. The title is The Manager’s Phrase Book and certain phrases are very insensitive. I will give a few examples from the book. I am copying verbatim....

tl;dr Don’t be a hero. Give them everything they ask. Use apps to hide your sensitive data. Use a password manager. Use yubikeys. Have a backup app on another device home. Don’t carry all your cards with you. Don’t have all your cards in your digital wallet. Keep a backup phone and an contact list at home. Keep your main baking card/credit card at home. Carry with your a different card for your daily expenses....

Back in 2020, thanks to a tweet from my friend Sam I decided to make a list of just the positive things that happened through that year. Reading back at that post I realise that it is useful even today. You get to appreciate all you did that year. So here is to keeping only the positives of 2022 Consistency I have struggled my entire life keeping good habits consistently. A lot of the times I pick up things just to abandon them later (hello guitar)....

Living abroad gave a lot of us a gift. The gift of feeling discombobulated in regards with belonging. I don’t think this feeling is unique to me, or to Greeks, or to anyone. It’s a human condition as common as life. But I happen to be Greek and I want to approach that subject from that perspective. Every now and again many Greeks that live abroad will have to deal with criticism from other Greeks regarding the choice of “leaving”....

A lot of the times as the employee of a startup or a bigger company you’ll get a grant of equity with your offer. This post deals with equity from private companies. Meaning companies that haven’t gone public via an IPO or similar. The way I look into company stocks is this: Calculate how much you “are losing” while employed in said company (roughly see what’s the upper band you would get elsewhere)....

I have a side project that it’s kinda abandoned. I am moving it from Google Cloud to Microsoft Azure and adding some new features to it. It’s an excellent way to learn more about Azure and practice some skills. This project is about helping you find a movie to watch. In this effort it requires ingesting some IMDB datasets. The datasets can be found here. The datasets are TSV files (tab separated)....

Coming in terms with your uniqueness Humans are social creatures. We thrive in communities, in groups of people, in our families. We benefit from feeling a sense of belonging in those groups and in order to achieve that we try to fit in as best we can. Here lies internal conflict though. How many concessions do you do in order to fit in? How much of your unique self do you give away?...

The career ladder. Everyone wants to climb it. I did write before that for young George, and many other developers, the career of a developer looked like this: Junior Mid level Senior Manager VP of Engineering CTO Elon Musk. After talking with a lot of people this progression sounds like what most employees and organisations have in mind. People go through reviews talking about achieving that elusive middle ground of senior developer....

This isn’t the first time I am doing this experiment. This is in fact my third iPad. I bought the first one sometime when the iPad 2 came out. I did see the potential then. A portable device ready to be with you at any point. It was obvious to me since then that it can fill an important gap. It sounds excellent for writing, taking notes, reading books and consuming content....

The phrase “Τα πάντα ρει και ουδέν μένει” is one attributed to Heraclitus, the ancient Greek philosopher. It translates to “everything flows and nothing stays”. To me this quote is one of the most profound ones regarding life in general. Things in life change, move and rarely remain the same for too long. The real question is how do we change with them? How do we adapt? Changes might include, but not limited to, changing jobs, changing cities, countries, friends, partners, houses, family, anything....