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.