Hi everybody !

I’m Jim Andrakakis. I’m a senior software engineer from Greece; with roots from Crete, raised mostly in Athens and since 2012 living in Switzerland, near Zürich. I’ve been coding since I was ten, and will probably continue until I’ve malloc()’d a block in the Great Heap In The Sky. I’m an incurable coffee addict, a finance and economics hobbyist, a firearm enthusiast, a cryptography aficionado(*) and I’m perpetually tormented by 3 beautiful women 😊

As my friends know, my official first name is not Jim, it’s Dimitrios (usually used as “Dimitris” in Greece). Jim is the equivalent in English. There’s a small backstory to why I introduce myself this way, but it’s not important.

Also: why “dandraka”? Well obviously it’s an abbreviation (first letter of first name + part of the surname) but more importantly it’s a small piece of personal history. It was the username I got when I worked, briefly, for the Muon Spectrometer in the ATLAS experiment of CERN. When I complained that I was used from other systems to a slightly different username, “dandrak”, a brilliant physist I met there suggested that that would sound like a washing machine model -so I guess I dodged that bullet 😊

So that’s my new blog, which I started after Jux announced that they would be shutting down. Real pity; it was a great platform, I loved it.

From now on I’ll be posting here my random thoughts, recipes, code and what-have-you.

Enjoy !

(*) please don’t confuse cryptography with “crypto”, i.e. anything to do with bitcoin and crypto-“currencies”. For what it’s worth (which is not much) I believe that the blockchain (the mathematical concept that underpins most cryptocurrencies) has the potential to facilitate some useful applications. But caught in the mania of bitcoin, which is an almost ridiculous concept, it has been blown completely out of proportion. Thus any effort to apply blockchain in a useful way is invariably doomed, due to it being so unbelievably overhyped.