About

My name is Giannis Kepas (aka Retr0) and I am a Computer Science student from Greece. From a very young age, around 14, I was fascinated by computers, how they worked and how infinite their capabilities were. I watched websites, video-games and other software constantly evolve and adapt to newer technologies, which got me wondering: “How does all of this work?“.

In other words, curiosity is what got me into programming. During high school I taught myself the fundamentals of programming and later on I successfully managed to be admitted at UoWM where I am currently pursuing a career in Computer Science and Research.

I am currently an undergraduate CS student at the University of Western Macedonia while also participating in other various activities tied to my university, specifically:

• Member of the Laboratory of Mixed Reality and Network-Based Systems (MIRANET) with a research focus in XR applications. An example of a project I worked on is the Hololens Geometric Lab.
• Student Member of IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) and an operational committee member of the IEEE Student Branch (SB) of UoWM-Kastoria. My activities in the SB have as far involved the internal organization and cleanup of the SB's archives, the participation in projects, the preparation and execution of various workshops and the preparation of teams for the global programming competition IEEEXtreme 17.0 (2023) while serving as the current IEEEXtreme Ambassador for the student branch.

I initially started programming during the COVID-19 quarantine, with my first "creation" being a Discord bot written in JavaScript for a gaming community I was part of. After that I started working on my own bot and despite abandoning the project, I continued learning the basics of programming by doing small tasks here and there in various international volunteer community projects.

Two years of constant programming in JavaScript and TypeScript later, I decided to step up and get into website development, learning PHP and SQL while working on the backend part of two community websites (Creators.TF and Amper).

Initially, I was interested in video-games and game development. I wanted to become a game dev and I started messing around in Unity, which made me discover the amazing world of C# (favourite language as you can probably understand). But I was aware that being a solo game dev is something really-really hard to do unless you have a lot of free time, which I do not since I have my university-related activities.

At the end of the day, website development is something I am interested in and confident about since I have worked a lot on websites in both the frontend and the backend part. All other skills I slowly built up remain helpful at my studies, giving me an advantage at various classes.

From all the projects I have worked on, and my studies, I have experience in:

• C and C#
• Unity development specifically feature and system implementation
• JavaScript/TypeScript and various frameworks such as:
• Discord.js
• Express.js
• Nest.js
• PHP
• Databases such as SQL and MongoDB
• HTML and (S)CSS
• Component based web frameworks such as Astro
• Python along with STEM Robotics
• Basic Systems Administration such as monitoring and webserver setup

I prefer to learn new skills as I need them and I can easily pick-up a new language or framework if I want to.

Due to my involvement in the university activities mentioned earlier I have been given the chance to improve my soft skills and greatly improve my communication with the people I partnered with but also in general. The activities that built up my soft skills and improved me in general are:

• Prepared and executed various technical workshops as well as presentations
• Participated in training courses and other informative seminars/webinars
• The general work I did while being part of various teams