The language surrounding coding job descriptions in English is vague and obscure. Operations, backend and frontend mean very different things depending on the domain, while different people under the same title often find themselves having nothing in common in their day-to-day.
Beyond the buzzwords
In my native language (Greek) the umbrella term for occupations that use code is a single word: programmer. AKA Coder. Even if our day-to-day is different, even if our official titles confuse the laypeople and other coders equally, at least we have the shared experience of writing code.
Experience
Job
Jun 2025 - Now | Fullstack Software Engineer @ Damon Cooperative
Full stack software engineer and then some. I do:
ops
webdev (mainly LAMP stack)
native apps (mainly Python with various frameworks, some C# with various frameworks), the works
Also:
marketing
sales
audio, video, photo editing
shooting photo and video ads
reaching out to influencers
and more
It's a custom wig workshop. Still haven't learned how to weave wigs :(
This is the app I developed for my undergrad thesis. It streamlines the digitization of questionnaires, built specifically according to the requirements of the greek JHDCNA.
PEWPMT - A python wordpress post migration console application
After getting locked out from a wordpress website, this app can be used to back up all posts in json format then reupload them to a new website. If you still have access to the old website, you could use the wordpress cli instead.
I do not really remember the first time I held a mouse or typed on a keyboard. According to legend I was 3 years old playing games on MSDOS circa 2000. Computers back then couldn't turn themselves off, you had to press the startup/shutdown key on the case after the OS was done shutting down.
My first experience with code was styling my blogspot page, and Hi5.com profile using CSS back in 2006. Hi5 was a social medium popular in Greece at the time. My first profile picture was a peace sign mirror selfie with a baseball cap rim hiding my face #blunderyears. I used a Sony Ericsson W800 to snap that picture.
In 2008 my friends migrated from Hi5 and MSN to Facebook. That's when I downloaded the firebug firefox extension and used it to edit private messages before screenshotting them, pretending my friends were sending me stuff they didn't, like homoerotic confessions. I inevitably learned a bit of javascript along the way.
By 2009, I had downloaded cheat engine and played around with it on multiple offline single player games. That was my first experience with assembly and dynamic computer memory allocation.
In 2010 I watched a remote web development seminar taught by undergraduate students Aggelatos and Zindros of the National Technical University of Athens in the midst of student protests squatting the university premises, halting the usual course schedule. Their seminar covered HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, MySQL, Apache, Subversion and more. I immediately started sharing this knowledge with classmates during school hours, we would write websites on paper for fun.
In 2011 we were introduced to the LOGO programming language in junior high school. It used to be part of the syllabus for an informatics course. LOGO is still my suggestion for absolute beginners that want to get into coding, since it offers one incredibly simple insight we often forget: all code is a list of instructions for a compiler or interpreter to follow, nothing more, nothing less.
In 2013 I started learning Glossa - a translated version of the Pascal programming language used in greek public university entry exams to this day. This is when concepts like algorithms and data structures started clicking for me.
Studies
In 2015 I joined the Ionian University d.i. as an undergraduate student. There I would dabble in C and later C++, C#, Java, Matlab and more programming languages. I still enjoy translating my coding challenge solutions to different languages and studying their similarities and discrepancies.
The complete syllabus is available on the department's website, but my personal favourite subjects were related to computer architecture, gamedev and graphics, security and privacy, language technology and artificial intelligence and finally computer networks. Some of the projects I created during the course of my studies can be found on my github profile while a lot more were lost to time and neglect.
I completed my undergrad thesis in 2025 titled "Cloud Platform for the Collection of Patient Data"; a simple Django medical forms/electronic health records application. It took me 10 years to gather the knowledge necessary to write the relevant code in a week and the relevant text/documentation in a month.
Work
I am proud of myself for avoiding a lot of occupations, companies and tech sectors such as finance, gambling, weapons, shipping etc. Unfortunately webdev is not one of those. I used to compare computer science grad webdevs to construction worker architects. I remember telling people web development is the easiest, crappiest, most mindnumbing and underpaid generic job a programmer can do. I was wrong, since it's harder than it looks.
In 2022 I got a job as a web developer building new features and fixing old bugs for school management systems in use by most public schools and administrative districts in the country as well as hundreds of private educational institutions in Greece and abroad. I learned a lot at that job, most notably how production code is a lie and all code is beta. Also how coming out as trans after joining a company (and keeping your job) is next to impossible without a ton of support.
In 2025 I joined Damon Cooperative, a small family business making custom wigs. I do some webdev still, building ecommerce websites, providing tech support and more. Most of my code is automating procedures such as cropping and resizing images, generating invoices and shipping labels, moving data between different stores and databases etc.
Open Source
I have some personal public projects and I have worked with students from Ionio d.i. on a bunch of them. My first true open source contribution however was a discord bot for the acceptance of new users and verification of their tickets for PyCon Greece 2025. It did its job, but it's still a work in progress for PyCon Greece 2026 - currently writing tests and augmenting it for general use + more info on what PyGreece is working on in our discord server.
My contributions to PyGreece be like.
Contact
persephone ,at' devper.si
My Πersi Δev logo. Been using inkscape for about 15 years yet this is my best work. Vector graphics is hard yo.
