About

Within Specifications (andmarios.com) is my personal blog — website. Who am I? I’m Marios, I’m located in Athens, Greece, I was born near the transition from Gen X to Millenial. You might have noticed the em-dash on my first sentence. It’s a habit I have for over 20 years now, since I discovered how the Alt Gr button in Linux allowed me to use extra characters. Unfortunately for some people nowadays it’s a tell-sign of AI-generated content. It is what it is. :)

What I’m doing in my daily life? I’m doing DevOps or whatever you want to call it; Platform Engineer? SRE? SysAdmin? I like to call it being a janitor (cleaning up after other people’s mess), a plumber (connecting systems), an editor and photoshop expert (I make a semi-working app look like a working app). At least this is what I tell myself. Reality is often more grounded, I have quite a fancy title (with director in it) and a wide range of responsibilities.

But you are not here to read my CV, you are here probably because of a Google Search malfunction and you were brave enough to scroll past the AI Overview section.

Outside work? Hard to tell, honestly. I was a late bloomer at work, so I used to have a ton of hobbies and interests, but for the last 15-20 years or so it is mostly work and lately family. I still have a lot of interests, but not enough time. I do like though to learn and try things. Not everything, not extreme sports, but tinkering (hacking is the correct word, but some people have spoiled it), and common activities all people do (cooking as an example).

I like to write on everything, just not so that often. It is a need, and a need needs to be satisfied. I dislike social media, I prefer the old, personal website model, hence here we are. Internet is THE platform, and we should keep it that way. I don’t care for likes or reactions, I don’t care for comments, I don’t care for views. Just like an actor, when on the stage performing, does not care about the audience. The theater may be full or empty, the people may make noise, look at their phones or piercing you with their stare. Doesn’t matter, you should always deliver the same performance. That’s why the original name of my website was Web Performance.

Some useful links:

Best, Marios

PS. What’s with the DO NOT PANIC banner? My favourite authors are Douglas Adams and Terry Pratchett. I chose something from the former, though I expanded it, the original is don’t panic. It’s something that always resonated with me and I’ve been preaching for most of my life. So long and thanks for all the fish!