The book
Project Ariadne
Software Is a Human Problem Wearing a Technical Costume
One day, at the peak of the biggest project of my career, I did nothing at all. Everything I could touch was blocked on another team's API, an unmade decision, a database change only one person was allowed to perform. The project was later scrapped in its entirety. None of its wounds were technical.
Thirty-one chapters on the craft of code, the machinery of shipping, the people who do the work, the process theater that consumes them, and the decisions that actually determine outcomes. Every chapter opens with something that really happened, and argues against itself before it's done.
More at projectariadne.dev: the lexicon, the counterarguments, and field notes on interviewing, the whiteboard and web performance.
About
I'm a software engineer in Athens, and I've been writing software for a living since 2012. Most of that time has gone into public-sector platforms at GRNET, systems that ministries, universities and students depend on every day. Along the way I've built debt-collection systems, a school platform used across Greece, backend services for a sportsbook and payment integrations that moved real money. Mostly C# and .NET, with the queues, databases and dashboards that come with them.
The longer I do this, the less I believe the code is what goes wrong. The most expensive failure I ever worked inside had good engineers and sound technology, and it was scrapped anyway. What killed it lived between the teams: decisions nobody owned, handoffs nobody watched, ceremonies nobody believed in. Project Ariadne is my attempt to write down what that taught me, for engineers who are good at the technical part and have noticed that things still go wrong.
I'm a certified Professional Scrum Master, which the book has opinions about. Outside work I'm a retro-gaming enthusiast who still remembers the last corners of Need for Speed III.
Work
GRNET · Greek Research and Technology Network
Design and build web applications for Greece's public sector on the Microsoft stack, working in Scrum as both developer and Scrum Master.
- ATLAS Ministry of Education
- OSY Ministry of Education
- Student Housing Benefit Ministry of Education
- Eury-Where Ministry of Education
- Transport Voucher Ministry of Shipping
- SFBB Ministry of Technology
Novibet
Built and maintained the payments infrastructure, with distributed transactions as sagas on MassTransit. Worldpay as the main provider, hosted and direct, plus PayPal, Skrill and Paysafe.
.NET · C# · SQL Server · RabbitMQ · MassTransit
Stoiximan / Betano
Designed, built and maintained applications and microservices for the company's infrastructure, and in the last months worked in Python alongside ML engineers to turn models into usable programs.
C# · RabbitMQ · Redis · PostgreSQL · Graylog · Grafana · Prometheus · Python
EPAFOS
Maintained Teleperformance's core debt-collection application, and worked on 4Schools, the platform used by most private and public schools in Greece.
- 4Schools C# .NET
- University Evaluation JSP · DUTH
- S800 Debt Collection VB6 · Teleperformance
- Advertising Tax Management VB6 · EDOEAP
Projects
Everything else is on GitHub.
Education & credentials
- 2012 – 2015
- University of Piraeus, MSc Network-Oriented Information SystemsThesis: Profile-Based Selection of Expert Groups
- 2005 – 2010
- Technical University of Crete, Electronic & Computer EngineeringThesis: an open-space 3D game with autonomous opponents · video
- Publication
- Profile-Based Selection of Expert GroupsTPDL 2016
- Certification
- Professional Scrum Master IScrum.org