cosmix.org
This site serves as a personal publishing vehicle and, as such, hosts a multitude of articles on a range of topics I’m interested in. No part of any article is sponsored. All opinions presented here are mine. The site is largely bilingual, with articles written in English and Ελληνικά (Hellenic) — with the addition of some small parts in Français. For a number of years, in the mid-2000s, it also hosted Spinalonga Records, a not-for-profit effort to promote independent Hellenic rock.
Who is cosmix anyway?
I was born in Athens, Hellas, in 1980, where I also grew up. I have a lifelong passion for computer science, software engineering and the multitude of ways they positively impact our lives. I was lucky to be exposed to computer programming at a very young age, writing my first program at the age of eight and never looking back. I went “online” on BBSes in 1992, and met the World Wide Web in mid-1994. cosmix was my handle in those days and it stuck with me ever since.
I studied at Imperial College London, where I took an M.Eng in Information Systems Engineering, at the time Imperial’s take on a joint EE/CS degree with some ‘management’ sprinkles on top. Afterwards I spent several years on doctoral research in distributed artificial intelligence, on the ways autonomous software agents might organise themselves, cooperate, and recover when no one among them is in charge. The subject sat between several fields and belonged cleanly to none of them, which was much of its appeal. What wasn’t that appealing was Imperial’s (and the Group’s) fixation with Event Calculus and the inherent need for self-citation so common in academic environments. Nonetheless, this was good work that I never properly finished. It was also, at the time, a quiet corner of computer science; it is quiet no longer, and I have recently been revisiting some of the questions that I left open, now from a very different standpoint.
At twenty-five I left to found my first company, Cosmical Technology, in Athens. Over the following decade our small team and I built AthensBook and ThessBook, two pioneering smartphone guides to the country’s largest cities, and GEO|ADS, an early platform for location-based mobile advertising, much of it through the worst years of the Greek financial crisis. Despite the difficulties we faced running a high-tech business like this in a country like Greece—and at the onset of probably the largest crisis this country ever faced—the ride was thrilling, demanding and fulfilling. They are products that rode on the smartphone and mobile computing revolution and a reminder that we live in an enthusing time that brings back memories of my childhood and those of another revolution, that of personal computing, about thirty or so years earlier.
I later led engineering at Beat, the Athens-born ride-hailing company, through a period of considerable growth. The company was eventually acquired by FREENOW, now owned by Lyft, and later wound down. At Beat I worked across a good deal of ground: redrawing the platform architecture for scale and reliability, growing the engineering organisation from roughly ten engineers to more than a hundred and forty, and establishing the Machine Learning, Analytics, Test Automation and several other groups. I learnt a great deal there about organisation, about management, and about building for scale.
After Beat I joined Netdata, an open-source infrastructure monitoring company, as its CTO for a year, and then Metrika, where I spent three years building operational intelligence for blockchain networks.
Today I work through Mindyield, my own practice, advising founders, chief executives, product and technology leaders, and boards, and taking the occasional fractional CxO engagement where there is a need and a fit. The world changes quickly now, and technology faster still. Having spent more than thirty years as a professional technologist, many of them as a CxO inside technology companies, I have come to believe that experience of that kind often does more good spread across many organisations than concentrated in any single one. Working alongside several at once is also the fastest way I know to keep learning: each teaches you something the others cannot, and the patterns that emerge across them are worth more than any single view from within. Advice is easy to offer, and only becoming easier to find; what I try to bring is something rarer and harder-won: the judgement of someone who has actually built and run what is under discussion, and has had to live with the consequences. It also leaves room to keep working on the questions I find most worth asking: what we ought to automate, what we ought to entrust to a machine, and what remains irreducibly human.
Set down in a list, all of this can look more deliberate than it ever was. If there is a thread, it is a modest one, and it has held for a long time: I have tended to follow particular problems rather than settle into a particular field, and to find the boundaries between subjects more interesting than their well-kept centres. The work I have cared about most has almost always been the work at a seam, where two disciplines meet and the conventions of neither quite hold. I expect that is where I will go on spending my attention.
I have not stopped building things, and I hope I never will; I still write software, and still, now and then, return to a technical or mathematical problem simply because it deserves the attention. I continue to write, and occasionally to speak, on technology, entrepreneurship and policy, with a long-standing concern for privacy and for the manner in which a technology settles into the society around it — a concern that feels considerably less abstract now than when I first began writing about it.
Much of my time belongs to my young family. What is left of it goes to photography, to reading, art and films, and to music; I once thought seriously about a life as a classical guitarist. In my younger days I enjoyed long runs, and I keep a lasting affection for history, philosophy, typography and design.
If you would like to work together, the best way to reach me is on LinkedIn.
Thanks for visiting cosmix.org!