George's blog

Thoughts of a developer, a photographer, a runner, a cook. All of them the same person. George is also on Twitter!

TypeScript: How to check for types. Using tagged unions.

Working with TypeScript has been amazing. One of the most common things I’ve been finding my self checking was whether one variable is of a…

Serving optimized images with AWS S3, API Gateway and CloudFront.

I like photography and I like having a dedicated space to share my photos along with a little story behind it. Currently that space is a…

Working on your own project. Starting AVCUD.

I am supposed to be writing these blog posts every weekend. This time I almost missed it. You should have been reading this text 5 days ago…

How to mock the backend with Webpack Dev Server

This is a very useful pattern I was using with my team at TransferWise to mock the backend. Spinning up an entire stack in a codebase with…

What if?

Me and my friend were running the other day and the conversation went to a “What if?” place. What if we never left our hometowns? What if I…

I feel guilty. The story of a grasshopper.

I feel guilty. The day starts and I start my usual ritual. Coffee beans, 16gr weighted, manually grind them, drop them in the aeropress…

How to start a sourdough starter

Growing up there was always bread at home. Either from a local bakery or later my grandmother baking it daily. I grew up loving it and…

Working from home: Two weeks worth of observations

One of the side effects of the quarantine is the fact that I got to work from home for a bit more than two weeks. Here’s some of my…

On office chairs

The first thing I bought when I rent my first house was a desk. I was using a random chair that was around. 3 months later I did start…

Dealing with a pandemic.

Suddenly we all had a rude awakening. We woke up in the dark ages, and it’s just begun. The coronavirus brought fear and panic to every…

Understanding exponential growth

The past few days it dawned on the entire world that the Coronavirus is here to stay. It’s going to be a long battle. A few people have been…

Behaving at work: Accessible but not too familiar

I’ve been working with other people for more than 10 years. My biggest challenge has always been interpersonal relationships, not technical…

(Stop) Reading the news.

It was on the height of the Greek Crisis back in 2012 when I decided to stop reading the news. The amount of depression I was getting from…

Product story telling.

Lets start by defining what is plot. Plot is the series of related events that make up a story or drama. Each event hooks out curiosity and…

Signal to noise ratio for human communication.

Definition: In human–computer interaction, the signal–to–noise ratio represents the ratio of relevant to irrelevant information in an…

Overwhelmed by choice: An ode to video clubs

It’s Friday. You finished work. You went home, made lunch, talked with your loved ones and it’s time for some you time. You open Netflix…

Dominator vs Facilitator

Interacting with people ain’t easy. Lets imagine a scenario where a lot of people come together and they are talking about something. Lets…

A good problem to have

Recently I started a new job. This brings an entire host of new habits to build and things to get adjusted to. One of these things is the…

Redesigning my blog with GatsbyJS

Lately I’ve been thinking that I wanted to redesign my blog. I wasn’t happy with the previous result, aesthetically. The simple solution to…

Book review: Release it!

After reading Building Microservices I felt really inspired and then i wanted to learn more about microservices and devops. Specifically…

Setting up your own VPN with Streisand Effect

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…

Book review: Building microservices

I’ve been working around Microservices for years, but only recently I did start wondering about how everything ties together. My experience…

Reducing your Webpack bundle size

The last couple of months, my team at Transferwise, has been working to deliver a new feature on our product. We call this feature Money…

Features vs Quality

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…

László Moholy-Nagy, the first modern designer?

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 problem with outsourcing

Today British Airways was all over the news. Fortunately no airplane tragedy happened. Unfortunately an IT tragedy happened. Specifically…

Cultural fit is killing your company. Hiring for diversity.

Back in the early 90s a group of experts, led by sociologist James Baron looked through various companies and followed them until the dot…

Feedback vs Noise

Noise /nɔɪz/ A sound, especially one that is loud or unpleasant or that causes disturbance. Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about the…

Empathy at work, lessons from the army

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…

Macbook Pro 2016, one month review

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…

Measuring your value

Transition There are certain types of work out there that you can visibly measure the work you did. When you are writing code you can…

Working with (data) driven and talented people

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…

Why frameworks like ReactJS have the HTML in the JavaScript?

TL;DR We keep the html in the javascript prerendered in order to achieve server side rendering and not track change. Makes our lives easier…

Cowboy Programming

Recently i stumbled on this, fairly, old article from Evan Miller talking about Julia programming language. It’s a nicely written article…

My glasses are from Texas

One of the first things i remember of my self is being really really young (5-6 years old) and sitting very very close to the TV and…

Removing a specific commit from Git

Today was one of those days that the team realises that one of the commits, from the past couple of days, was introducing all sorts of side…

Getting Started with React: The very basics

React is a, fairly, new Library created by the awesome people at Facebook. React is an excellent library for creating components and use it…

The Case of recursive functions in Javascript

Recursive functions are awesome! It’s one of those concepts that make software development magical. The ability to use a function, inside…

Side projects: From experiment, to idea, to hitting the wall

For the past 6 months I’ve been working on a new side project. It all started when i wanted to learn a bit more about BackboneJS. Even…

What is a new project?

Recently I had a conversation regarding a project I’m working on and the potential of adding more members to the (one man) team in order to…

Dress code and start-up culture

When I first started looking for a job after university, almost 6 years ago, I was really concerned about how should I get dressed for an…

Chrome Dev tools 101: The Timeline tab

Most of the web developers I know choose Chrome as the browser of their choice to test their apps, debug and ultimately browse the web…

Creativity vs Adding Business Value. Keeping yourself sane.

Recently I read an article called Don’t Call Yourself A Programmer. I have to admit that the article makes some very valid points and also…

2014, my year in review.

There is no denying that 2014 was quite the year! Great things happened in the world, like Malala Yousafzai winning the Nobel price award…

performance.fail

A simple website created to be intentionally slow.

Web Components: What is shadow DOM and how to use it.

Web Components is a new specification that is a set of four other specifications: Templates Shadow DOM Custom Elements and Packaging. Here…

Discourse, breaking UX rules and making me think

About a week ago i had a small exchange of messages with Jeff Atwood regarding his new start-up Discourse and the forum of my favourite…

My favorite podcasts for 2014

Morning commute is boring and in London it tends to be crazy too. In order to spend that time more productively and make it enjoyable I…

minichat.co

A simple Chat service, based on nodeJS and Socket.io

Why Object.observe is the best feature of ES7 so far

For the past year i’ve been reading a lot about Object.observe and all the magic it will add in our apps. Very recently though i’ve read…

The future of CSS. CSS Shapes and CSS Masking.

Last week i went to a Meetup and watched a great talk by Razvan Caliman, who works for adobe, named The Expressive Web where he talked about…

People don't leave managers, they leave cultures.

I’ve been reading some articles lately regarding people leaving big corporations. Specifically Jordan Price left Apple and also several…

Social media, online friends and staying in touch

I remember the very first years of social media, older people went crazy about them. I was constantly listening to things like “this isn’t…

Moving on, with Jekyll

The new year was full of surprises for me. The loss of a loved person can be the instigator for changes in your life. The first change came…

Developing front end apps. The tools i use

Front End developing has changed massively the last couple of years. The introduction of amazing JavaScript frameworks, starting from jQuery…

Migrating from Gmail to FastMail

Lately I’ve been having thoughts of leaving Gmail, mostly due to the fact that I didn’t like ads in my email and because the interface was a…

Creating a responsive website

Some weeks ago i wrote in twitter that there are no excuses, in this day and age, to have a non responsive website. The web is changing…

A curious geek: What’s deflation?

Recently I was reading the news and I realized that Greece now has Deflation, aka negative inflation. I was wondering what that means and as…

The best quote about success: Don’t try!

A few minutes ago a friend of mine posted something that Charles Bukowski wrote, so I decided to go to Wikipedia (bless thy Wikipedia) and…

Life without a tablet

If you are following me on twitter, and you should, you’ll know that I was thinking of selling my iPad 2 to buy the iPad mini. That crazy…

Horizontal Scrolling, Coda Slider 3 and image maps

Lately I’ve been designing a web site, for a client, that needs to be horizontal scrolling. For those of you who are not familiar, a…

Portfolio for a Developer. Why not?

Not too much time ago, i was reading an article from Jeff Atwood that was talking about Software Developers and their portfolios (the…

How mobile devices and the web saved the day

The story begins two weeks ago. I was on vacation in Berlin and I was having a break from the usual coding routine. I had no PCs with me…

Hello World Wide Web

It has been more than 10 years since I wrote my first line of code and the first line of code I’ve even written was a “Hello world” header…