Hi, I'm Valentinos.

avatar

"Flexible and convenient".  My strapline to describe how the software must be for the client. I like developing new things, learning new technologies and meeting new people.

About Me

My name is Valentinos Papasavvas. I am sociable, energetic and friendly person. My interpersonal skills make me a good communicator, able to work well with others. I motivate and encourage people around me. I am self-aware and always seek to learn and grow. I am not scared of undertaking new responsibilities no matter the degree of difficulty. I am a critical thinker and a good researcher.

Currently, my main focus is on coaching teams which deals with high end traffic products along with other internal projects that are based on various PHP and .NET frameworks. Day to day operations are:

  • Allocate resources, manage expectations and performance, and drive team efficiencies
  • Manage the use of technology stacks and ensures that team members grow their knowledge base, by utilizing Online courses and additional professional development
  • Participate in the hiring and onboarding process
  • Work with other business units to analyze trends and product needs for continues product improvement
  • Enhance engineering efficiency by closely observing the team and identify opportunities
  • Provide mentorship and technical guidance to teammates
  • Own development projects from conception through build, testing, implementation and support ensuring they meet business needs.
  • Manage QA resources to ensure through testing of all code before release. Utilising automated testing where possible.

We give emphasis on delivering a feature or a final product on time along with quality code. Each person evaluates and reviews code of others to guarantee the best result.

In my free time, I am an active and athletic person seeking for action and adventure all the time. I always look for new technologies and like to play and develop my own projects, in order to expand my knowledge and keep up to date with the latest technologies. I tend to play with latest technologies and programming languages, which some of them can be found in my Github page.

This resume was build by a module I wrote called Drupal Resume.

Experiences

  • Head of Engineering

    Intergo Telecom Ltd

    09/2021 - Current

    THE ROLE:

    Leading and coaching remote teams on one of the biggest products of the company along with other smaller products the company has, ensuring the design and delivery of high quality, robust software solutions while adhering to predefined timescales and budgets.

    RESPONSIBILITIES:

    • Manage and lead day to day operations, collaborating with the team leads, including scoping projects, resource management, assigning workload, training and development.
    • Participate daily on potential and existing customer meetings discussing with their Engineering Team how our Products can be integrated and identify needs that we can implement to help more businesses
    • Allocate resources, manage expectations and performance, and drive team efficiencies
    • Manage the use of technology stacks and ensures that team members grow their knowledge base, by utilizing Online courses and additional professional development
    • Participate in the hiring and onboarding process
    • Work with other business units to analyze trends and product needs for continues product improvement
    • Enhance engineering efficiency by closely observing the team and identify opportunities
    • Provide mentorship and technical guidance to teammates
    • Identifying bottlenecks on the systems and try and find the cause through various APM tools
    • Own development projects from conception through build, testing, implementation and support ensuring they meet business needs.
    • Manage QA resources to ensure through testing of all code before release. Utilising automated testing where possible.

  • Software Development Manager

    Mindgeek

    08/2019 - 09/2021

    THE ROLE:

    Leading and coaching teams on some of the biggest products of the company along with other internal products the company has, ensuring the design and delivery of high quality, robust software solutions while adhering to predefined timescales and budgets.

    RESPONSIBILITIES:

    • Manage and lead day to day operations, collaborating with the team leads, including scoping projects, resource management, assigning workload, training and development.
    • Allocate resources, manage expectations and performance, and drive team efficiencies
    • Manage the use of technology stacks and ensures that team members grow their knowledge base, by utilizing Online courses and additional professional development
    • Participate in the hiring and onboarding process
    • Work with other business units to analyze trends and product needs for continues product improvement
    • Enhance engineering efficiency by closely observing the team and identify opportunities
    • Provide mentorship and technical guidance to teammates
    • Own development projects from conception through build, testing, implementation and support ensuring they meet business needs.
    • Manage QA resources to ensure through testing of all code before release. Utilising automated testing where possible.

  • Lead Software Developer

    Mindgeek

    09/2017 - 08/2019

    THE ROLE:

    Responsible for coaching a team that deals with one of the biggest products of the company along with other internal products the company has, providing continuous feedback, suggesting potential improvements, working closing with the product department.

    RESPONSIBILITIES:

    • Setting a sustainable pace to deliver the completed, tested, integrated, production ready software
    • Analyse processes in order to provide solutions
    • Providing continues feedback to the team
    • Making regular meetings with Seniors to improve the process of the team
    • Making bi-weekly meetings with the team to discuss the Sprint process and what we can do better
    • Dealing with issues that block the Sprint process
    • Suggesting new technologies to improve and optimize the services a product uses
    • Split the deliverable into stages and make small releases.
    • Perform code review and detrermine recommendations for adaptation
    • Pair programming to approach a problem with different opinions

  • Senior PHP Developer

    MindGeek

    01/2017 - 09/2017

    THE ROLE:

    Responsible for maintaining the products the company has, collaborate with the team for potential improvements, involve in project management.

    RESPONSIBILITIES:

    • Setting a sustainable pace to deliver the completed, tested, integrated, production ready software
    • Analyse processes in order to provide solutions
    • Team collaboration in Cyprus and Germany
    • Split the deliverable into stages and make small releases.
    • Perform code verification and detrermine recommendations for adaptation
    • Pair programming to approach a problem with different opinions

  • Senior PHP Programmer

    Approved Food

    08/2016 - 11/2016

    THE ROLE:

    Responsible for the internal picking system, collaborate with the team for potential improvements, involve in project management.

    RESPONSIBILITIES:

    • Setting a sustainable pace to deliver the completed, tested, integrated, production ready software
    • Split the current system into Microservices written in Laravel Framework that will consume an API,written in Lumen Framework
    • Reviewing new technologies and making suggestions for possible improvements in the system
    • Collaborate with the people in the warehouse to understand the needs of the system
    • Split the deliverable into stages and make small releases.
    • Undertake merge requests for code improvement
    • Implement unit and integration tests
    • Pair programming to approach a problem with different opinions

  • Senior Web Developer - iOS Developer

    Llama Digital

    02/2014 - 08/2016

    THE ROLE:

    Collaborate with others to deliver quality code, involve in project management, provide guidance and imporevements in the process of delivering a feature/product to a client.

    RESPONSIBILITIES:

    • Setting a sustainable pace to deliver the most completed, tested, integrated, production ready software
    • Stand up meetings to keep up to date with the process of each person in the team
    • Suggest solutions to the team and get different opinions of how to achieve the best result
    • Communicate with the clients and understand their requirements
    • Split the deliverable into stages and show each stage to the client to see the progress and to get feedback.
    • Use of Rubber Duck Debugging method
    • Meet the deadlines inside the team by dividing and analysing each point of a project/feature
    • Refactor whenever is needed to keep the project quality and security up to date
    • Implement unit testing - TDD for the developers to be aware if they accidentally break a feature and BDD for the clients to understand what we tested for the deliverable based on the User Stories
    • Pair programming to approach a problem with different opinions
    • Develop and maintain the company's main mobile Application called Situate on iOS
    • Work on various type of big projects of the company based on PHP MVC Framework
    • Use merge requests for code review
    • Suggest new technologies to be used based on client requirements

  • Web Developer

    Llama Digital

    01/2012 - 02/2014

    THE ROLE:

    Started as Graduate Web Developer, I was involved of learning and developing in all CMS of the company. After that point, I was trained with PHP Zend Framework to collaborative with developer and project management teams to deliver quality development.

    RESPONSIBILITIES:

    • Pair with a team and work on big projects based on PHP Zend Framework
    • Maintain and support various CMS that the company has (Drupal 6,7, MODx Evolution/Revolution, Magento E-commerce,Wordpress) 
    • Convert legacy code into a quality structure code
    • Started using version control

Education

  • MSc Database Professional - Sheffield Hallam University

    01/2011 - 01/2012

    • Databases & the Web, Data Warehousing, Industrial Expertise, IT Project Management Logical Database Development, Physical Database Design and Administration, Study Skills for Professionals, Web Application Design and Modelling
    • MSc Thesis Title: “Investigation of Column-Based Databases Performance against Relational Databases”
    • Final Year Project Grade: 76 / 100
    • Grade: First Class Honours (73.2 / 100)

  • BSc (Hons) Computer Science - University of Crete

    09/2006 - 10/2010

    • Year 1 Modules
      • Introduction to Computer Science, Digital Design, Calculus I, Physics I, English I, Programming in C, Calculus II, Linear Algebra, Discrete Mathematics, English II.
    • Year 2 Modules
      • Data Structures, Probability Theory I, Object-Oriented Programming, Theory of Computation, English III, Logic, Applied Mathematics for Engineers, Computer Organization, Software Technology Laboratory, English IV
    • Year 3 Modules
      • Computer Networks, Languages and Compilers, Files and Databases, Operating Systems, Algorithms and Complexity.
    • Year 4
      • ​Final Year Project Title: “Design of Parallelization of the single-node Oracle/Berkeley Database through the use of a Distributed Coordination Service (Borealis)”
    • Final Year Project Grade: 9 / 10
    • Course Overall grade: 6.76 / 10

Skills

PHP OO MVC
Zend Framework
HTML
CSS/CSS3
Twitter Bootstrap 3
MySQL
PHPUnit Testing
iBeacon
Responsive Web Design
Drupal 7
Git/BitBucket Version Control
Linux
AJAX
Wordpress
Gitlab
Xcode
REST API
Sagepay
XP Principles
Rabbit MQ
PHP Resque
SaaS product
JSON
Composer
Apiary API Design Stack
Laravel MVC Framework
JIRA
Javascript
Apache
Behat Testing
Scrum
Less
MODx Evolution/Revolution
Google Analytics Goals/Funnels
Objective C
Bash Script
Lumen Microservice MVC Framework
Memcache
Agile
iBeacon
Automated deployments
Redis
Paypal API Payments
Sass
Project Management
Google Analytics
Grunt
Javascript
Vagrant
Ansible
Amazon S3
Cocos2D
Amazon SES
Amazon SNS
Google Analytics Ecommerce
Bower
Magento E-commerce
Elasticsearch
Facebook API
Mongo DB
Node js
Beginner
Proficient
Expert
Master

Languages

Greek
English

Hobbies

Cooking and trying different cuisines
Cycling
Going to the gym
Researching
Disassembling devices and fixing them
Travelling in various countries
Attend car meetings and events
Participate in events

Awards

HackManchester 2012

10/2012

2012 HackManchester Companies challenge winner (with the Llama Squad) winning the Best Company Award for our Automate Time Tracker web application

HackManchester 2015 Award - Create the best use of beacons for the Rise community

10/2015

2015 HackManchester won the The Barclays/Rise Challenge - Create the best use of beacons for the Rise community. On https://youtu.be/YvBy7DBaesk?t=1247 we are on the final 3 for rentalcars.com competition and on https://youtu.be/YvBy7DBaesk?t=2188 we are again on final 3 for Rise Challenge and win the big prizes.

Training Certificate for Zend Framework: Fundamentals Course

07/2013

Successful completion of the training of Zend Framework: Fundamentals Course. View the Zend Certificate here.

Training certificate for iOS iPhone & iPad Apps Development

11/2013

Successful completion of the training of iOS iPhone & iPad Apps Development. View the iOS Certificate here.