Hello everybody!
My name is Alex and I am a young software engineer. I currently live in Athens, but I have been raised in a smaller city of north Greece. I came to Athens as an 18 year-old to start my studies at the city’s technical university, as an electrical and computer engineer, and it went pretty fine, with lots of fun, but hard studying during exams too!
Right now I work as a Java developer in a telecommunication system vendor and this is my first job to get. I am part of a group of five people, dedicated to a specific product. We run Ubuntu linux on our laptops, which is really cool – I had my first linux distro installed in my machine as a fresh man in uni and never turned back to Windows since – write code in Java as said before, use Git as our version control system and have made use of various Apache projects like Camel, ActiveMQ and also Wicket for our product’s GUI. During the last weeks we have all been making some research about CoreOS, met the great 12 Factor App rules and experimented on virtual clusters with fleet and etcd. It was a great experience for me because I felt like a student again, met new fascinating technologies, tried to understand them, ran tests on my computer’s VMs!
And here comes the reason why I started this blog. First of all I like keeping notes while I study or do research: it helps me keep a tempo I like, go back to my notes to remember or clarify things and quickly get back on track after some time I have not occupied myself with a specific issue. Since my job is full of buzzwords, Google is always a friend, Wikipedia offers an enormous storage of knowledge and sites like Stackoverflow can be of great help. What I have encountered a lot of times though are articles and posts that do not explain terms in a simply way, but use more buzzwords, vague phrases and technical features instead. I remember searching for what exactly is Apache Camel to meet David Newcomb’s answer stating that a project description should not be complicated and describing the project in a nice, understandable way. And he got over 500 upvotes for this answer! 500! Even more than the selected as correct answer got! So I was really inspired from this thought, and tried to keep my own notes simple and easy to understand too. Soon I realized that this is not an easy task and it demands a good understanding of what you want to describe plus an organized flow of thoughts so the person who will read your notes finds it easy to get your point. I am not sure that my notes are that good enough yet but I will post them here, try to improve myself post by post, share with everybody the knowledge I got and hopefully exchange opinions and comments with other technology enthousiasts!
I chose “travelling” to be part of the blog’s title because of my passion to make journeys and see new places. I will also share some of my journeys here and specially the ones inside Greece. My country has a lot of beautiful places, where nature meets history and the visitor can enjoy the local way of living. But although many of you will have heard of Athens or Mykonos, I ‘m not sure how well known is Samothraki, an island with a big mountain in the centre of it, rivers and water all over the place, great facilities for camping and “hidden” places of great beauty!
So, these were just some words to introduce myself and describe what this blog is all about! I am looking forward – and will soon start preparing – my first technology post about CoreOS! See you around!
EDIT: This was the first post I uploaded in a wordpress blog called Travelling With Code, that is currently being integrated with Github Pages. I will not keep the same blog title but I wanted to keep the post exactly as I posted it the first time. Reading it again gets back in mind all these thoughts and feelings I had when writing it, which makes it pretty sentimental :)