My first brush with web development happened during my first year at the Informatics Department of the Athens University of Economics and Business. An assignment on HTML pulled me into the web, and honestly, I still haven't escaped. Soon I stumbled onto things like PHP, JavaScript, jQuery, mootools and more. That’s how I got hooked. I started building a few amateur websites, just for fun at first.
I decided to look for a job so I could learn more. In February 2009, I met Netstudio and Yannis Karampelas for the first time. The excitement and vision I found there made me want to join the team. Luckily for me, Netstudio thought I could be a good fit too, so we started working together—and we still are.
At first, I worked on dynamic websites using the Joomla! CMS. Pretty soon, I got more complex projects: building an internal task management system, online shops, and CRM tools.
Some highlights at Netstudio: our trip to Portugal for the “OFFF” design conference, and attending Google’s annual GAAC-WOAC conference at their Silicon Valley headquarters in September 2009 and September 2010.
In February 2011, we got a big surprise. Yannis told the team we’d stop using Joomla for dynamic sites and switch to Drupal. I really disagreed at first. I thought moving to a new system was a mistake, especially since we’d just mastered Joomla. That month, we were about to launch the most advanced online shop we’d ever built in Joomla. We even presented it as a Case Study at the first Joomla Day Athens. Still, Yannis’s decision to move to Drupal turned out to be right. Now, I’m the biggest fan of that move. Drupal gave us the tool we needed to build the advanced projects we’d been dreaming about. Plus, switching to Drupal brought new trips: London, Munich, Amsterdam, and Barcelona, for the annual DrupalCon conferences in 2011, 2012, 2014, and 2015!
