Meet the Team: Tech lead Bill Seremetis

Bill Seremetis is the Managed Services team’s tech lead, providing technical direction wherever necessary. This includes performing solution architecture, providing guidance to developers, helping delivery managers translate clients’ needs into development tasks, and steering conversations towards workable solutions.

He is also a skilled developer, who tackles both backend and frontend tasks, including a bit of devops and automated QA for a variety of projects.

Alison Visser: Whereabouts in the world are you?

Bill Seremetis: I live in Patras, in Greece. It’s in the northern Peloponnese, about 200km west of Athens, and is actually Greece's third-largest city, after Athens and Thessaloniki. 

Bill Seremetis.

I’ve always lived in Patras, apart from living in Athens for six years. I was born and raised here. Most of my family is here too. 

Alison: Why did you move to Athens? 

Bill: I went to Athens to study. I was doing a degree in bioengineering, but it wasn’t something I was passionate about. I returned to Patras and started my Drupal career. 

Alison: How did you get into coding? 

Bill: My father was a developer in the 70s and 80s and we always had computers in our house. I was exposed to them young – I was about four years old. I would play tetris on a monochrome computer, which probably had something like 64KB of RAM. 

At the time gaming machines like Atari were popular, but I never had them as a child so whenever I wanted to play a video game I would play on a computer. We’re talking pixelated video games from the 80s of course. 

Around 1993/1994 I started fooling around with a bit of BASIC programs, nothing major. And a bit of LOGO. So I was actually writing small programs – maybe 50 lines tops – by the age of 11. I’d write them on paper and try to type them into the computer to see if they’d actually do what I wanted them to do. Sometimes they did. 

So I knew from a very early age that I wanted to work with computers. I didn’t really know much about the industry but I knew I wanted to be a developer. 

Alison: When did you land your first developer position? 

Bill: When I finished school I went to Athens to study bioengineering. My degree included a thesis and practical work. But instead of going into bioengineering I started writing software for hospitals and medical clinics. I was working on the .NET framework, writing applications for hospitals, and also running a couple of university sites on SMF. 

Alison: So how did you get into Drupal? 

Bill: When I moved back to Patras there weren’t any big companies so I couldn’t continue with .NET. Working with Drupal was a coincidence. 

Somebody said the word Drupal while I was bartending in my early 20s, I heard it and I did some research on it. I loved it the first time I laid my hands on it. We’re talking Drupal 6.2. 

I’d had experience with other systems and played with other programs, but for some reason Drupal really merged with how my brain worked. I could understand it, which wasn't the case with other systems. I loved its structure. Things were where they were supposed to be, so I stuck with it, and I never regretted it – not yet, anyway. 

Alison: You’re very involved with the Drupal community 

Bill: In 2010/2011 a big company asked me to rebuild their website. I rebuilt it in Drupal and after a couple of months other agencies were starting to ask who built it. 

And then I was introduced to the Greek Drupal community. Back then there were only about six of us, and I’ve been friends with them ever since. But it grew quickly, and what started as a very small group is now a 250-member community.

Members of the Greek Drupal Community at Drupalcon Barcelona 2024. Bill is in the A-team shirt in the front.

I learn a lot from the Greek Drupal community. I try to ensure that we have good communication, and I help organise events. I’m very involved in the community, and I love it.

Although I liked software before, I really fell in love with Drupal. It affected my entire life. I made friends, and became better at what I do. I collaborated with some people and one thing led to another – I was exposed to a broader market and started working for companies abroad. 

Alison: So is that how you ended up working with Annertech? 

Bill: I started working with Annertech in 2022. There is a story behind it: I was in the delivery room, waiting for my second son to be born. These things can take a while, and I was on my phone when I saw that there was a vacancy at Annertech. I sent the email to Annertech from the delivery room. So two important relationships were born that day. 

Alison: What do you like most about your job? 

Bill: That’s a tough question. I like the creativity, I like logical puzzles and solving problems. I love solving them in a proper and elegant way. And I love it when I get the chance to try something new, to expand to new areas. 

Of course, most of the time the job has nothing to do with the above as we all know. We often inherit bad code which we need to decipher, or legacy systems which don’t push us forward. Like any job it has moments that are amazing and those that aren’t so amazing.

Alison: What are your interests outside of work? 

Bill: I try to be creative with my kids, to get them to explore new things. They are 4 and 2, so every moment with them is a new experience. 

I also try to climb when possible. There are many mountains around Patras – although they’re not big and famous. I mostly climb in the Kalogria region. It's close by and we also get to swim when we are done climbing.

Bill scales a mountain near Patras.

Reading and listening to music are also on the list, when time allows. I love a good Sci-Fi book (Clarke, Asimov, Robinson etc). 

As for music, I’ll listen to anything that doesn’t give me a headache. I’ve been listening to a lot of classical music lately, but I often switch to Reggae in the summer, just to keep up with the temperatures. I’ll listen to anything though. It’s better to ask me what I don’t like to listen to than what I like to listen to. I have a sweet spot for Canterbury Rock (Camel, Caravan, Pink Floyd), but there are no limits really.

Alison: Is there anything else we should know about you? 

Bill: During my studies I had a few jobs. One of these was at a photography studio, and this is where I fell in love with photography. 

I started as a runner, and soon after that I started controlling the network and equipment, and ended up working as a photographer and did some video editing. I also worked as a waiter/bartender until things started rolling with web development. This lasted many years (waitering about five, photography more than eight). 

I still love photography and I miss it often. 

Alison: What kind of photographer were you? 

Bill: I was shooting weddings. It was a side job to help me get things going with Drupal. 

Alison: What kind of photography is your favourite? 

Bill: I enjoy street photography, but I’m too nervous to shoot people. It works for me when I’m in big capital cities where people don’t care, but not so much in small Greek cities. I also love architecture. You could say that I enjoy having my camera with me when travelling.

Images taken by Bill at recent DrupalCons:

Prague, 2022.

Lille, 2023.

Barcelona, 2024.

Alison: You’ve taken some gorgeous photos while travelling to DrupalCons, and not just cityscapes or buildings – you’ve taken some great photos of the Annertech team. What is it about people, especially these ones, that you enjoy photographing? 

Bill: It’s a tough subject but an easy answer! We are a remote team, so we don’t get to spend much time together, not in real life anyway. I do like to take photos of us. Just us! 

Bill took this photo of Juanluis Lozano, Adrien Sirjacques and Mike King in Barcelona, 2024.
 

Ricardo Flores Galán and Alison Visser take a break from their running duties at Trivia Night in Barcelona 2024.

Whenever we get the chance to meet I like to capture that moment. Working remotely makes it hard to create lasting memories with friends.

For me, taking these photos helps. And trust me, it’s not about me taking photos, I like it just as much when other people in the team take on that photographer's role.

Alison: What is it that you like about the Annertech team? 

Bill: Just look at the photos above!! Everything! 

I’ve worked with many (far too many) remote teams over the years. Annertech stands out for a multitude of reasons. 

We are a good bunch of people, and we feel for each other from miles away. We value each other and understand that every day is not the same, that life happens, that you might need to let off some steam or that you just want a break from a task. 

It’s all the little things actually. They use a fancy term nowadays for that: “being human”. In Annertech I never had to feel that we need a term for that, we’ve always treated each other as humans. 

Of course there are the big things too: getting to work for bigger projects, having time to do contributions. There are always opportunities to improve and thrive, sometimes more sometimes less, but there’s room for self improvement. 

To sum it up, Annertech has it all, at least for me. That doesn’t mean it’s easy, it never is. It’s a job and it can be from easy to frustratingly hard at times, but I get to do it with people I consider friends and who I know see me as a friend, even if we only meet in real life for 40 hours a year. You can’t beat that!