Initially was hired as a "code-janitor" for the company's main website gentwo.com, entrusted with full freedom on defining and carrying out tasks on my own. Primary goals have been:

• resolving heaps of technical debt on the code-base
• heavily increasing the amount of website content that can be configured from the CMS
• radically improving performance, SEO, accessibility, and security
• identifying and resolving hundreds of UI/UX issues resulting in a much more polished product
• migrating to the latest versions of vue and nuxt
• improving and optimizing development toolset
• educating the in-house tech team on all the above knowledge domains

In time I've been tasked with major new features like:

• combining gentwodigital.com into gentwo.com
• member zone
• authentication

Letter of Recommendation

Was invited to join the Contakt team at Sclable as a multi-disciplined Front-End developer. Soon the existing team elected me to lead them in the development of the €4.5M platform that revolutionizes the logistics and analytics of large construction sites.

Duties beyond the standard feature development and maintenance have been focused around elevating the Developer Experience (DX) of the team and quality of the resulting product/code via:

• smooth onboarding of new team members
• raising code standards
• optimizing webpack/typescript/babel configurations
• rewriting prod/dev CI pipelines
• tightening our use of Typescript
• ensuring minimum code-quality with linters + githooks
• practicing code reviews
• mentoring and inspiring co-workers for excellence
• proxying for upper management
• taking pivotal product design decisions
• occasionally doing sales with the client directly
• ... (ask for more)

Notable personal accomplishments include (but are not limited to):

• rescuing a challenging project from imminent failure into a recurring financial success
• monumental improvement of application performance (>10x)
• development of a zero-config, state-of-the-art code linting solution for all JS engineers of the company, covering multiple FE and BE technologies seamlessly
• design and delivery of the most successful and well-received internal educational program (cross-discipline, on PWAs)
• research and development of custom architectural solutions for sleek GraphQL integration as well as swift internationalization of our FE app
• migration from a vastly outdated app foundation to a highly modern state, leading up to achieving full PWA status
• specialized 3-D software programming (integral module in our web app)
• ... (ask for more)

Was invited to join the BestPrice.gr team to assist in multiple web-technology efforts. This included further development and maintenance of public-facing front-end products as well as for the company's sizeable internal tools, optimizing performance, strengthening security and often streamlining the architecture of major node.js micro-services.

Soon was in charge of all things analytics and responsible to implement various tracking solutions, document them for non-technical personnel and report back with findings according to the requirements of the marketing team.

Additionally responsible to onboard, educate, support and mentor junior colleagues.

It wasn't uncommon for me to also spend time UI-copy-writing when needed and making UI/UX and product decisions along the way.

BestPrice.gr is the fastest growing, consumer-product search-engine in Greece (think Greek Amazon), utilizing cutting-edge tech and world-class R&D front-to-back.

Responsible for taking initiative and turning the existing in-house 3-D Secure back-end into a stand-alone SaaS product under the name 3dsecure.io.

This included business and marketing decisions such as pricing and branding, copy writing, UX/UI design and development of the product's front-end presence.

Additional responsibilities include the architectural design & set-up for the product as a whole, along with development of a back-end integrating with the checkout, recurring payment and customer support services.

Research and development of cutting-edge technologies in the fintech sector.

Worked the architecture and implementation of the project's MVP which consists of a merchant-facing Progressive Web App, a high-tech payment widget, an account-less consumer-facing mobile app for online payments and an API connected to a payment processor. Additionally managed the ops for the Plirono platform and carried out visual design (company logo, pre-launch website, etc) and business tasks (pitch deck, client meetings, etc).

Following a minor exit (see Sale of Key Custom Software and Services to Major European Bank) and although blessed with an exceptional business mentor, I decided to terminate the project mainly due to the lack of a co-founder.

Jack-of-all-trades solution-bringer and success-maker. Ground-up design and development of the Tour of Crete website. Authoring of the entirety of the multimedia content, plus translation of all texts between English and Greek. Technical, visual and product design and development including core business aspects of the actual product offered (international cycling event). Additional services provided as IT and custom tooling development for batch image processing. Successful regular Facebook Page promotion and highly efficient Facebook Ads marketing.

All x2, for first ToC event on 2016 and complete setup of 2017 event before quitting in a responsible and professional manner due to compensation misconducts from the side of the employer.

Website (archived version): https://web.archive.org/web/20161008051929/http://tourofcrete.com

Website (code): https://github.com/maninak/tourofcrete

In British startup Omnixell I developed the multi- shopping cart, offers, appointments and the map modules, most notably. All work was carried out in a codebase that started from scratch with Ionic2 and Angular2 still deep in beta at the time. I co-developed the published angular2-omnixell-lib module on npm that provides easy connectivity with the Omnixell back-end API.

Worked part-time in the lab team, on the project titled "Visualization of RDF/S Evolution using Provenance Queries", which was implemented as a Protege plugin.

Worked part-time helping university students understand in depth and succeed in their programming classes. Taught up to advanced courses, e.g. Computer Organization, with absolute success to the point of having particular students travel more than 150 kilometers per week to meet-up.

Successfully completed an intensive 3h/day, 5days/week, 14-week-long, course on the German language at the B2 level.

Developed a brand new, entirely from scratch compiler for a new dynamically typed programming language (similar to Javascript), featuring advanced grammar like iterators and unnamed callback functions. Additional development of the Virtual Machine for that language.

Developed a 2D game engine from scratch in C++ using the Allegro library. Additional development of the classic video game Bubble Bobble using that engine.

I was awarded the certification of advanced knowledge in German as a result of my foreign-language studies in Greece.

I was awarded the certification of Proficiency in English as a result of my foreign-language studies in Greece.

I was also awarded a certificate of Advanced Knowledge in English 4 months before that, by University of Cambridge with the top grade "A". Only 3 other students in Greece achieved that in the same examination period.

Sharing grounded, hard truths and actionable advice I wish my past self had available at the time but didn't, to an audience of fledging programmers that hopefully found it insightful.

Published by FreeCodeCamp, the largest programming-related publisher on Medium.com with over 500.000 followers.

Talked at the Institute of Computer Science of the Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas, in a classroom full of magnificent researchers, professors, students and professional programmers.

My talk under the name "Progressive Web Apps (PWA): Supercharge your webapps, boost conversions and ditch the app-stores" covered:

• What a PWA is and isn't
• The PWA experience from the perspective of actual users
• The shortcomings of current native mobile and web apps and how a PWA approach overcomes them
• Technical details of PWA approach for performance
• The current and near-future state of PWA technology and its business implications
• Major adopters of PWA technology and specific metrics showcasing how it benefited their business
• Ways businesses can adopt PWA technology in their products

Slides (written in English)

My talk was one of four given that day, hosted by Devstaff, a thriving, Greek developer community.

Talked at the Institute of Computer Science of the Foundation for Research and Technology - Hellas, in their amphitheater full of magnificent researchers, professors, students and professional programmers.

My talk under the name "A Brief, Non-Technical Intro To Bitcoin" covered:

• What Bitcoin is and it's unique characteristics
• The problems Bitcoin solves
• The risks Bitcoin faces
• How to acquire and transact Bitcoins
• Personal advice
• Overall insight accumulated via my early entry (2010) to the Bitcoin ecosystem as a miner, daytrader and analyst.

Slides (written in English), video (spoken in Greek)

My talk was one of four given that day, hosted by Devstaff, a thriving, Greek developer community.

Mr. Maninakis’ diverse tasks during this time included in particular:

• Development of complex single-page web application for business applications
• Development of frontend libraries used in several customer projects
• Close collaboration with product owners, backend- and mobile developers and UX/UI- designers in a cross-functional project setup
• Optimization of developer experience in customer project setups
• Deployment of applications into customer IT infrastructure
• Knowledge transfer of technical expertise to other team members

Mr. Maninakis worked very reliably and conscientiously and always had a very high degree of initiative and willingness to perform. He completed the tasks assigned to him with the highest dedication.

Mr. Maninakis was a very motivated employee who realized the agreed goals extremely ambitiously and independently. His precise way of working and his assertiveness were remarkable.

Due to his always obliging and helpful manner, Mr. Maninakis was equally appreciated by his superiors and colleagues. He is a very open-minded and cooperative employee and he represented our company in a very loyal manner. We could absolutely rely on his discretion at all times.

This month an open-source Typescript library I developed and shared on Github with the public community of developers across the world reached 30K downloads per week on npm!

ts-xor introduces the new generic type XOR. You can use XOR to compose your own custom types with mutually exclusive members which was previously not possible in Typescript out-of-the-box.

Completed successfully a full-day intensive workshop with the creator of Vue.js, Evan You himself.

During the worshop we got a deep understanding of the rewritten v3 architecture and inner-workings of the framework by building parts of it ourselves, including the reactivity, virtual DOM and other sub systems.

Attended the world's largest Vue.js conference and wrote about my experience in this blogpost.

Took part in Startup Europe Week Crete's pitching contest, pitching my fintech startup project "Plirono" among Greece's top banking representatives, receiving critical acclaim for its engineering innovations.

Reached a contract to sell privately developed, custom, e-commerce software solution and provisioning of consultant services for a month to a major European banking entity. Specifics still under NDA.