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These days having a VPN is a very smart choice you can do. Either you work on a public space, in your office or any foreign country you are travelling. You can never be sure who is listening. Also there are certain governments that are not really friendly. So once you decided a VPN is worth it you need to understand how it really works. In very abstract terms what you are doing is setting up a connection between your device (laptop, smartphone etc) to a remote server (the VPN provider)....

During the early stages of a company the focus is to move fast. It’s a matter of survival. The founders have probably left some lofty careers, the money is limited and the competition feels very threatening. In an environment like this, where speed is the name of the game, quality is not exactly the number one priority. To be honest, that’s the right approach. A mediocre product that’s in front of users now is better that a very well written that never sees the light of the day....

Recently I was on a trip to New York. One of my first destinations was the Museum of Modern Art, and for a good reason. The MoMA is one of the best museums I’ve even been (along with Tate Modern in London). In there I had the opportunity to see amazing exhibits like sculptures from the amazing Louise Bourgeois, paintings from Pablo Picasso and one of my favourites Giorgio de Chirico ....

Today British Airways was all over the news. Fortunately no airplane tragedy happened. Unfortunately an IT tragedy happened. Specifically all systems went down worldwide due to a power supply issue. Now, if you’ve worked on IT for more than a couple of years you’ll have to wonder. How did they manage this? Do they have only 1 database with a laptop running all operations? What happens with backup data centers? Backup systems?...

Back in the early 90s a group of experts, led by sociologist James Baron looked through various companies and followed them until the dot com crash in the dawn for the 21st century. They did focus mostly around, how the companies were managing to grow and the strategies they followed. They categorised these firms in three basic categories : Companies that hired people based on professional skills. These are people that are highly skilled on a specific field....

Noise /nɔɪz/ A sound, especially one that is loud or unpleasant or that causes disturbance. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the concept of feedback. Specifically when the feedback stops being something constructive, that can enable you to grow, and becomes noise. It becomes something that distracts your from the things that you should be really focusing on and instead it puts you in a constant state of alert and uneasiness....

Back in 2008 I was serving in the Greek army. It was a dull and boring period of my life, but not without learnings. During one of these dull mornings, i was sent by my major to do a really mundane task (it was so mundane that i don’t even remember what it was anymore). When i came back i was visibly upset by the lack of sense this task made for me, but i tried to be stoic, hide it and move on....

tl;dr: Buy it if you have a laptop before 2015, don’t buy it if you have last years Macbook Pro. Also there are cheaper alternatives if you can’t justify the steep price point. Overall it’s really enjoyable and I like it. For the last 3 years, or so, I’ve been using a Macbook Air. It was the 2013 edition with an upgraded intel i7 and 8gb of RAM. It’s been a wonderful machine....

There are certain types of work out there that you can visibly measure the work you did. When you are writing code you can measure the lines of code you wrote, or if you are more experienced the features you deployed. If you are a designer you can tell how many new things you produced, how many solutions you provide. Same if you are a builder building a house. You can visibly see the progress. ...

For the past 10 years of my career i’ve been extremely lucky as I worked with some very talented people. In several occasions i felt inspired by the talent my colleagues possessed. Still remember the first intern i worked with and how good she was (she is thriving now), that technical architect in my first job that had all the answers and my amazing colleagues at TransferWise now. The thing that i haven’t had though, in such extend, is the amount of driven people around me....