Who
I am Giota, a professional Software Engineer from Greece, currently living in Munich
Technology and education are my biggest passions. I love coding, solving problems, teaching and learning every day! I am not afraid to push the edge to reality and get out of my comfort zone. Whenever I am not learning something new, I am more than happy to share my knowledge with others. I always enjoy getting the most out of collaboration.
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Working experience
For the past 15 years I have been working with plenty of Web technologies. I started my career as a Front-end and Back-end developer in Greece before moving to Prague to work as a Software Engineer at Skype/Microsoft. I am fortunate enough to have worked in cross functional teams, thus having been involved in all phases of software development lifecycle: front-end & back-end development, deployment, TDD, CI, automation testing & monitoring with a focus towards building well-structured, maintainable, modular and well tested code. As a certified SCRUM master, I had the pleasure to work in agile environments, enjoying the active involvement, cooperation and collaboration between team members.
Currently I am working as a Software Engineer in a cool startup in Munich, where we build our own Browser with a pre-built search engine. We combine Browsers, Data and Machine Learning to build innovative and secure products for our users. How cool is this?
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Education
I hold a BSc in Applied Informatics and MSc in Computer Science from Aristotle University of Greece with specialization in the field of Information and Communication Technologies in Education (ICT). During my studies I learned how to learn and apart from programming and coding skills I mostly developed high metacognitive skills.
Being always fascinated by learning and teaching, in parallel with my Web Development Career, I continued my studies by attending the School of Pedagogical and Technological Education, where I was awarded with the “Certificate of Pedagogical and Teaching Competence”.
In order to keep up with the latest technologies, I constantly keep learning by attending courses on Coursera, Pluralsight and Udemy!
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Mentoring
Did I mention that I love teaching? Yep, I really do! So in order to fulfil my two passions I work professionally as a Coding Mentor as well. There’s nothing better than combining my pedagogical studies together with my professional hands-on experience. When I mentor my students, in order to help them succeed, we do a lot of pair programming and live coding with focus on the know-how and know-who. Using a systematic approach of breaking down complex problems into simpler ones and developing strong communication skills, is all they need to handle any situation.
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Course Writer & Reviewer
In the past I had the pleasure to create an e-learning platform and write the content for an online course about the Microsoft Office applications suite, covering a wide range of software programs including Excel, Outlook, Word, Access, Internet and PowerPoint, both in text and video formats.
Currently I am the Course Reviewer and Quiz Writer for a new Node.js course on Careerfoundry, covering a wide range of topics like node.js modules, package managers, web servers using Express, MongoDB and serverless functions.
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Skills
html5, css3, javascript, jquery, react, node.js, ruby on rails, grunt, sass, handlebars, git, github, responsive design, cross browser compatibility, python, C#, php/mysql, AWS, Windows Azure, MVC frameworks, unit/integration testing, scrum & agile methodologies.