Minimalism

Studied exclusively on a 30GB Arch Linux partition with 260 BK/s maximum and unstable internet speed, to do University projects using mostly NeoVim, for 2 years.

By autumn 2023, using Vi without terminal multiplexing is comfortable, and tmux, emacs, zsh bash and even dash, therefore any POSIX compliant shell, are all decently comfortable to use for extensive periods of time.

High school

Graduated high school with a 17325/20000 score on 2019. The final exams included algebra, physics, the hardest chemistry exam in a long time, and essay reading and writing. Went to France with the program E-Twinning.

Improvised a proof for the volume of a cone, math for Wolfenstein 3D - style graphics without being taught vectors yet, and watched plenty from the YouTube channels 3blue1brown, Mathologer, Numberphile, Computerphile and Matt Parker.

In the University got interest in ThePrimeagen, Healthy Gamer GG and Ramsey Dewey.

Went to the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (UoA), to the Department of Informatics (DI). Participated with effort and enthousiasm in the the open source compiler project of ACM's student chapter, though the knowledge gap didn't allow to contribute much. As of now, Autumn 2023, hasn't worked. Had a tiny internship with Helvia that introduced web development basics.

Languages

Did 5am morning warm-ups for a span of about 3 weeks in Autumn 2023, and afternoon exercises on and off using mostly C, but sometimes also Python, Haskell and Matlab (GNU Octave to be exact) The algorithms were about parallelism, data structures and data manipulation, using TDD, TCR or neither, often in Vi (not referring to Vim).

Outside deliberate pracrice and unfortunately as a painkiller for loneliness, I've got some touch with Rust, Graphviz Dot, AWK, GNU Make, BF, J slightly, lisp and Typescript. Indeed everything surrounding Typescript is emotionally painful except the syntax.

Both for myself and for the University, familiarized with C++, Python, PHP, LaTeX, HTML CSS and Javascript, Java, Bourne and POSIX shell scripting (bash let's say). The aforementioned warm-ups were also done in languages for the University.

Architecture

Reworked the operating system's key binding framework, home directory structure and image tagging systems about 5 times each, following my needs and addressing inabilities, in a natural and slow pace over the span of 2 years. The approaches were radical to me, images placed in a binary tree of manual binary grouping decisions, coding projects getting tagged by language using symlinks, a snippet completion and generation system providing shell scripts for key bindings, and a lot more. Ended up with technically elegant solutions.

Through this journey I got to value prototyping, thinking in tradeoffs, technical simplicity from high to low levels, and the Manifesto for Agile Software Development.

Friends

Lived lonely and proud until the age of 21, unable to understand why people talk about people who talk, but eventually humbled and started making friends despite the struggles of staying behind.

Collaborated with various people. On one project we willingly worked next to each other 4 hours a day 4 days a week for 2 months, rounding the numbers below the theoretical maximum. That's 6 per 4 for 3. That was the absolute best experience. The worst project experiences came from resistance to collaborate.

Worked with 2 traumatizing people on separate projects, most things were amazing with the kind hearted random one, most things were distgusting with the tough love daddy commercial product culture one, I still want to burn his house down. I showed an amount of resistense that burnt me out for good, but he'd freeze until he'd forget everything wrong and tranform into a motorbike politician again.

Illustration and the piano

Quit the piano after 7/9 steps to the diploma, when the world view changed and didn't line up with the typcial motivations for playing.

Then started illustration, guided by theDraw A Box community and lessons, as well as videos from Stanislav Prokopenko.

Arts cultivated respect towards old means of achieving goals, old experienced people's advice, warming up before working and measuring the value of work by looking at it as an outsider.

YouTube

Recorded YouTube videos using ffmpeg piping /dev/video0 to mpv for showing the webcam's output on the screen. The purpose of the YouTube channel is to share knowledge and life experiences.