Hi, my name is George Stefanis 👋
Thoughts of a developer, a photographer, a runner, a cook. All of them the same person.
2022 keeping only the positives
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)....
The final station
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”....
How I treat private company equity
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)....
First contact with AWK
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
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?...
What is a senior developer. A guide for aspiring developers and hiring managers.
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....
An iPad Pro as a productivity device
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....
Dealing with change
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....
Custom Login With Nextjs and Amazon Cognito
Some prerequisites In this tutorial I assume you have yarn or npm installed and you can translate commands from one to the other. I will be using yarn here. I also assume that you have the AWS CLI installed and configured. During the configuration stage you will set an AWS user to run all your Amplify commands. This user needs to have all the relevant IAM roles attached to it....
Create and Verify a New User on a Cognito User Pool
If you just created a new Cognito User Pool and you want to add a new user fear not. You can add that user using the cognito interface but you won’t be able to do much with it as the user will need to be verified and change their password. Register a new user You can go to the user interface of your Cognito User Pool and add the user there....