🐍 Software Engineer, OOP Instructor & Cybersecurity / GRC Professional in the making

I have 10+ years of hands-on software engineering experience, including Android apps downloaded more than 15 million times, and I create educational content on programming, electronics and maker projects. Right now I'm moving into cybersecurity and information security governance, risk and compliance (GRC). I'm building hands-on skills in security operations, vulnerability management, AI security and security frameworks, while I keep teaching and building.

Okay, real talk: my cybersecurity origin story starts in ancient Sparta.

I grew up in Sparta, and Spartans were doing cryptography a very long time before it was cool. There's this thing called a scytale, basically a wooden stick ancient Spartan generals used to scramble secret military messages so they looked like nonsense to anyone without the matching stick. As a kid, learning that people were hiding secrets in plain sight thousands of years ago genuinely blew my mind. I didn't know it yet, but that was the moment.

That curiosity never really left. It just went quiet for a while, buried under a computer science degree, a master's thesis where I built encryption into actual hardware, time spent handling secure military communications, and years of building software and teaching people how to code. Cybersecurity was always the thing humming in the background. Now I'm finally chasing it properly. One step at a time. It feels less like starting something new and more like coming home.

Certifications & training

• 🏅 ISO/IEC 27001 Lead Auditor: exam passed (Credly), through the GRC Mastery course (auditing, risk management and compliance)
• 🏅 Qualys Certified Specialist – VMDR: vulnerability scanning, prioritisation and remediation
• 🏅 TryHackMe AI Security Certificate: prompt injection, jailbreaking, RAG and data poisoning, AI supply chain security. AI security is the area I'm most excited about
• 🏅 Google Cybersecurity Certificate
• 📜 Cyber Regulatory Compliance & Policy Management (CADMUS, EU co-funded): NIS2, DORA and the Cyber Resilience Act
• 📜 Deloitte Australia Cyber Job Simulation: log analysis and incident investigation
• 🎯 Completed TryHackMe's SOC Level 1 path (alert triage in Splunk and Elastic, phishing analysis, MITRE ATT&CK), with the SAL1 exam this month
• 📚 Currently studying for CompTIA Security+ (November 2026)
• 🏆 Ranked in the top 1% of all TryHackMe users worldwide, and top 110 in Greece (view profile)

Projects

• 📊 NIST CSF 2.0 Gap Assessment & Remediation Roadmap: all 106 subcategories across the 6 core functions, assessed for a B2B SaaS scenario, with a prioritised roadmap
• 🧪 Home security lab with Kali Linux and Wireshark

Hardware implementation of a cryptographic system on an FPGA · MSc in Advanced Computer Systems (Embedded Systems), University of Piraeus

• What: a C# desktop chat application whose messages were encrypted and decrypted in hardware, on an FPGA
• Hardware: Xilinx Spartan-3 FPGA, with DES and Blowfish implemented as dedicated hardware datapaths
• Control: a PicoBlaze soft processor coordinating the crypto engines and the communication with the PC
• Feature: real-time switching between DES and Blowfish, chosen by the user, without reprogramming the device
• Why it still matters: it gave me a low-level understanding of how symmetric ciphers work, how keys and data move through a system, and where the weak points are. It's the same thinking behind hardware security modules (HSMs), secure elements and the protections I later built into my own apps.

Build a Living Cell Ecosystem from Scratch

I created this course to teach OOP principles through hands-on project work in just 3.5 hours. Encapsulation, inheritance, polymorphism and design patterns, all through practical application.

✨ What you'll build:

• A fully interactive cellular ecosystem simulation
• Real-world implementation of OOP design patterns
• Modular, scalable code architecture

→ Enroll Now

• educ8s.tv: Electronics, Arduino and Maker Projects
• Programming With Nick: Programming Tutorials & Courses

Languages:

• Python | C/C++ | Kotlin | Java | C#

Platforms & Tools:

• Android Development | SQLite | Arduino & ESP32 | FPGA/Embedded Systems | Linux | Git

Security & GRC:

• ISO 27001 (Lead Auditor) | NIST CSF 2.0 | NIS2 & DORA | Risk Management | Compliance Auditing
• Vulnerability Management (Qualys VMDR) | SIEM (Splunk, Elastic) | MITRE ATT&CK | Wireshark | Kali Linux
• AI/LLM Security (OWASP Top 10 for LLM Applications)

Currently Learning:

• CompTIA Security+ | Microsoft security & Azure (SC-200, AZ-900) | Detection engineering

Feel free to reach out if you want to collaborate on projects, talk cybersecurity, or just chat about technology!

⭐️ From educ8s