Hi! I am Foivos (pronounced [‘fivos]) Zakkak and I am a Software Engineer in Red Hat’s Java platform team working on Mandrel, GraalVM and Quarkus. Prior to joining Red Hat I spent 9.5 years as a post-graduate and post-doctoral researcher. I worked at the Advanced Processor Technologies (APT) group of the University of Manchester where I led the development of the Maxine VM, a metacircular Java-in-Java VM. Before that I worked at the Computer Architecture and VLSI Systems Laboratory (CARV) of FORTH-ICS, where in the context of the GreenVM project, I developed DiSquawk, a Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that targets non-cache-coherent architectures. During my post-graduate studies I also developed SCOOP, a source-to-source compiler that used information from task annotations (memory footprints) to generate optimized code for task-based runtime systems. I was also involved in the development and performance analysis process of the TPC (Tagged Procedure Calls), BDDT (Block-level Dynamic Dependence Analysis for Deterministic Task-Based Parallelism) and PARTEE (PARallel Task Execution Engine) task-based runtime systems.
As developers, many of us have the privilege of disposable income at a young age.
However, it seems that many of us struggle to figure out how to make the best out of this disposable income.
Often this money sits in savings accounts with interest rates lower than the inflation rate, resulting in a net loss over time.
In this talk we will focus on two fundamental principles of personal finance: budgeting and investing.
I will provide an introductory overview of index investing through Exchange-Traded Funds (ETFs), an increasingly accessible investment option that is widely recommended for new investors.
By the end of this talk, I hope that you will be able to start your journey into making your money work for you, rather than serving the interests of your bank.
This talk is an updated version of the quite popular talk "Investing for geeks" delivered by Georgios Andrianakis and Dimitris Kateros at Devoxx Greece 2025. I thank both for allowing me to build upon their original content.
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