Christos Sotiriou

React and MobX-state-tree

Building a simple app with this excellent alternative to ReduxFor the past 6 years, React has been my go-to solution for developing web interfaces. Its concepts are simple to grasp, and I also love how it allows me to build my own stack around it to build the frontend interface

development

3 Reasons Why You Are Not Yet A Good Software Engineer

So what are some things that make you a bad Software Engineer?

javascript

How to write your own strapi upload provider

One of the features that strapi comes out of the box with, is static file uploading. Strapi comes prepackaged with a module to allow file uploading to the local disk. If you are deploying in the cloud, however, you will most probably need to upload your static files.

gaming

Remembering the original Doom game

The original Doom game, some of the most popular source ports, and its legacy.

web development

Using Streams efficiently in NodeJS

How to download and parse a file containing a few millions of entries (around 500Mbytes) and then perform operations based on the content. How to perform efficient backpressuring by leveraging NodeJS streams

web development

Fault Tolerance for Microservices

What is it, why you should care, and how to apply it using Quarkus.

career

Tips for developers during the Coronavirus quarantine

If you are used to working on-premises, you may find that adapting to working from home may have left you a bit disoriented.

devops

Your Private CI/CD using self-hosted GitLab and Docker

Leverage Gitlab and Docker and use them as a CI/CD infrastructure It's very often that I need a deployment environment while developing personal projects. I have tried many alternatives to test, package, and deploy my solutions when developing. If you don't yet have a CI/CD environment, you should

software engineering

Human Aspects of Working as a Software Engineer

A small collection of cases that frequently occur when working in the field of Software.We are Software Engineers. We pride ourselves to write the most concise code, to create good architectural designs. We tend to believe that our professional life is full of code, debugging, drawings in whiteboards, and

web development

Using three of the top NodeJS Web REST API Frameworks

Javascript is full of options. And over the years, I have found myself running through the same problems over and over again and solving them each time using a slightly improved method over the last one. In this post, I am sharing my experience with a set of the most popular NodeJS frameworks.

career

Do you need a Computer Science Degree?

Yes, but not just for the obvious reasons.As Software Development is becoming more accessible through internet media, I see more and more places on the Internet with people asking, “Do I really need a Software Engineering (or Computer Science) Degree in order to get a job in the Industry?

microservices

Microservices: Have you thought this through?

Regardless of the traction that microservices architectures have, there are technical areas and essential matters that you should take into consideration before developing in a microservices structure.

Blog

Goodbye iOS... Hello Web development

The last year has been one hell of a year for me. After eight years of full-time iOS development and 11 years of developing for Apple devices, I decided to move on to something new that I have wanted for longer than I was willing to admit. A quick recap

software engineering

Speed up NodeJS server-side development with Webpack 4 + HMR.

When webpack 4.0 came out, I decided to migrate my codebase implementing webpack for the frontend to webpack 4.0. One thing I hadn’t invested time to do however, is to enable HMR in my backend code. I have a project that takes approx 30 seconds to start

mobile-development

8 months with Texture (a.k.a. AsyncDisplayKit)

I have to admit that I love React & React Native. I began using React in 2014, and React Native in 2016. I loved RN not because of its cross-platform mechanics, but for its pragmatic approach when designing user interfaces and its ability to componentize a screen. A component can

Blog

Working for personal projects without burning out

There are some among us who just can’t sit tight, and feel the urge to create something on their own. Most of the time this ‘something’ will end up never seeing the light of day. It has happened to me, I assume that this is the case for everyone

Blog

DevLog: How I created my first AR NodeJS-backed web service

A few years ago, a client of mine had an idea about an application that would leverage augmented reality features to play videos on top of images that would be featured into pages of his Greek news magazine. Back then, NodeJS was in the mid 10.x (around 2014). There

Blog

On software dogmas

I love coding. I don’t care about the language I use, or the technology. I care about solving difficult problems, about creating something from nothing. I grew up believing that software is philosophy, knowledge, way of thinking. I still do. However, I have to admit that based on the

Android

React Native Navigation

I have been trying to find a good navigation library for a project I have undertaken, and I have been looking into numerous frameworks the last few days. Although I have been able to find some decent frameworks, I haven’t still found the best library for navigating i

software engineering

A Showcase of Ambient Intelligence appliances

It’s been a while since my last blog post. Those were some very busy months. One of the highlight of those months, was work done for Atcom NEXT, a yearly event where we get to show the future of technology put some of our ideas into practice, and create

Blog

REST Client in Swift with Promises

Diving deeper into Swift, I am examining different ways of improving my architecture, and making the best decisions when creating new applications. For me, architecture and expressiveness in the code is much more important that a complicated algorithm that boosts performance over 100%. One thing I am called to do

Blog

R.I.P. iGreekNews part 2

In an unexpected turn of events, I was forced to take down iGreekNews. In short, Apple didn’t like that iGreekNews consults RSS feeds from various sources. I find it strange, considering that the purpose of RSS is to be free, and it is a means of communicating with news

Blog

* Release * iGreekNews 2.0 for iOS

One year after I took down iGreekNews (along with iMe), I decided to re-implement iGreekNews using a new approach. It was time to put my NodeJS skills to good use, and construct an API around news feeds, and RSS, and also re-write the iOS application from the ground up using

javascript

NodeJS, Varnish + NginX

I am building a web service, and I chose NodeJS as a backend, due to its efficiency and simplicity. However, since nodejs is single thread – single process, other means of making the process more responsive under server high server load must be implemented. There are many ways of achieving

iOS

Vuforia SDK + remote video streaming on iOS

I recently have undertaken a project on iOS that requires integration with the Vuforia SDK. It’s an augmented reality proprietary framework, built for iOS and Android and has been very popular due to its innovative recognition library. One of the coolest demos that are appealing to advertisers or people