Giorgos Tsiftsis

My name is Giorgos Tsiftsis, and I would describe myself as a problem solver. I enjoy working on interesting problems, and I take great satisfaction when solutions come to fruition. I live in Athens with my wife and our daughter. My interests revolve around creativity, particularly music, poetry, and philosophy.

Tech

In relation to tech, I would characterize myself as a programmer with a focus on backend development, although not exclusively. I have a strong affinity for Ruby because it offers freedom of expression, and working with it is enjoyable – I’ve been working on Ruby projects for 20 years and still find pleasure in tackling new ones. Besides Ruby, I have been involved in projects where solving problems required working with Javascript, Python, Clojure, Redis, ElasticSearch, MongoDB, MariaDB, and PostgreSQL. I would say that over the last 10 years, these are the technologies I’ve worked with in some depth and for a significant amount of time, particularly at Skroutz.

Skroutz

Currently, Skroutz is the largest website and e-commerce platform in Greece, with about 1 million unique visitors per day. It wasn’t always like this, of course. When I joined the company, there were 10 developers, and we literally all worked on everything. Over the years, I’ve gained a lot of experience, faced many challenges – some of which we couldn’t find good solutions for – and overall, I’m grateful for how things have evolved. For example, I managed to hire over 40 developers, oversee all product engineering with a team of more than 50 people for 4 years, and in recent years, design and execute, together with a relatively small team, the expansion of Skroutz into Cyprus and the Balkans.

HOW

We started HOW with my friend Dimitris completely experimentally and without any serious long-term plan. I do not know exactly how it happened, but years have passed and we are here, exploring the landscape, learning new and interesting things, working with new technologies, but most importantly, it seems we are solving real problems for teams that have real needs, and we really like that!