Been doing this for a while and I don't plan to stop any
time soon. Coding is the gift that keeps on giving.
I used to be a fullstack C# ASP.NET Web Forms dev.
Nowadays I am the solo tech at my company, using python
whenever I can.
On the state of the realm
The language surrounding coding job descriptions in
English is vague and obscure. Operations, backend and
frontend mean very different things depending on the
domain, while fellow programmers under the same title
often find themselves having nothing in common in their
day-to-day.
Beyond the buzzwords
In my native language (Greek) the umbrella term for
occupations that use code is a single word:
programmer. AKA Coder. Even if our day-to-day is
different, even if our official titles confuse the
laypeople and other coders equally, at least we have
the shared experience of writing code.
I represented the Greek Transgender Support Association
as a community organizer. I also cowrote the PyGreece
discord bot and volunteered as a proposal reviewer.
This is the app I developed for my undergrad thesis. It
streamlines the digitization of questionnaires, built
specifically according to the requirements of the greek
JHDCNA.
PEWPMT - A python wordpress post migration console
application
After getting locked out from a wordpress website, this
app can be used to back up all posts in json format then
reupload them to a new website. If you still have access
to the old website, you could use the wordpress cli
instead.
I do not really remember the first time I held a mouse or
typed on a keyboard. According to legend I was 3 years old
playing games on MSDOS circa 2000. Computers back then
couldn't turn themselves off, you had to press the
startup/shutdown key on the case after the OS was done
shutting down.
My first experience with code was styling my blogspot page,
and Hi5.com profile using CSS back in 2006. Hi5 was a social
medium popular in Greece at the time. My first profile
picture was a peace sign mirror selfie with a baseball cap
rim hiding my face #blunderyears. I used a Sony Ericsson
W800 to snap that picture.
In 2008 my friends migrated from Hi5 and MSN to Facebook.
That's when I downloaded the firebug firefox extension and
used it to edit private messages before screenshotting them,
pretending my friends were sending me stuff they didn't,
like homoerotic confessions. I inevitably learned a bit of
javascript along the way.
By 2009, I had downloaded cheat engine and played around
with it on multiple offline single player games. That was my
first experience with assembly and dynamic computer memory
allocation.
In 2010 I watched a remote web development seminar taught by
undergraduate students Aggelatos and Zindros of the National
Technical University of Athens in the midst of student
protests squatting the university premises, halting the
usual course schedule. Their seminar covered HTML, CSS,
Javascript, PHP, MySQL, Apache, Subversion and more. I
immediately started sharing this knowledge with classmates
during school hours, we would write websites on paper for
fun.
In 2011 we were introduced to the LOGO programming language
in junior high school. It used to be part of the syllabus
for an informatics course. LOGO is still my suggestion for
absolute beginners that want to get into coding, since it
offers one incredibly simple insight we often forget: all
code is a list of instructions for a compiler or interpreter
to follow, nothing more, nothing less.
In 2013 I started learning Glossa - a translated version of
the Pascal programming language used in greek public
university entry exams to this day. This is when concepts
like algorithms and data structures started clicking for me.
Studies
In 2015 I joined the Ionian University d.i. as an
undergraduate student. There I would dabble in C and later
C++, C#, Java, Matlab and more programming languages. I
still enjoy translating my coding challenge solutions to
different languages and studying their similarities and
discrepancies.
The complete syllabus is available on the department's
website, but my personal favourite subjects were related to
computer architecture, gamedev and graphics, security and
privacy, language technology and artificial intelligence and
finally computer networks. Some of the projects I created
during the course of my studies can be found on my github
profile while a lot more were lost to time and neglect.
I completed my undergrad thesis in 2025 titled "Cloud
Platform for the Collection of Patient Data"; a simple
Django medical forms/electronic health records application.
It took me 10 years to gather the knowledge necessary to
write the relevant code in a week and the relevant
text/documentation in a month.
Work
I am proud of myself for avoiding a lot of occupations,
companies and tech sectors such as finance, gambling,
weapons, shipping etc. Unfortunately webdev is not one of
those. I used to compare computer science grad webdevs to
construction worker architects. I remember telling people
web development is the easiest, crappiest, most mindnumbing
and underpaid generic job a programmer can do. I was wrong,
since it's harder than it looks.
In 2022 I got a job as a web developer building new features
and fixing old bugs for school management systems in use by
most public schools and administrative districts in the
country as well as hundreds of private educational
institutions in Greece and abroad. I learned a lot at that
job, most notably how production code is a lie and all code
is beta. Also how coming out as trans after joining a
company (and keeping your job) is next to impossible without
a ton of support.
In 2025 I joined Damon Cooperative, a small family business
making custom wigs. I do some webdev still, building
ecommerce websites, providing tech support and more. Most of
my code is automating procedures such as cropping and
resizing images, generating invoices and shipping labels,
moving data between different stores and databases etc.
Open Source
I have some personal public projects and I have worked with
students from Ionio d.i. on a bunch of them. My first true
open source contribution however was a discord bot for the
acceptance of new users and verification of their tickets
for PyCon Greece 2025. It did its job, but it's still a work
in progress for PyCon Greece 2026 - currently writing tests
and augmenting it for general use + more info on what
PyGreece is working on in our
discord server.
My contributions to PyGreece be like.
Contact
persephone ,at' devper.si
My Πersi Δev logo. Been using inkscape for about 15 years
yet this is my best work. Vector graphics is hard yo.
