About me

Polymath par excellence. Philosopher. Politologist. FOSS Hacker. Farmer. Baker. Brewer. Canine handler. Calisthenics athlete…

Basic information

  • Name: Protesilaos (Πρωτεσίλαος)
  • Birth place: Greece
  • Birth year: 1988
  • Email: public@protesilaos.com (no social media)

Career overview

  • Greece 2003-2006: High school years and semi-professional football (soccer) player. Also a part-time apprentice to a motorcycle mechanic.
  • Cyprus 2006-2011: University studies in parallel with various seasonal and part-time jobs.
  • Belgium 2012-2014: Accredited parliamentary assistant to MEP Rui Tavares for the Greens/EFA group (European Parliament). Our base of operations was in Brussels. Would move to Strasbourg for the plenary session weeks.
  • Various 2015-2018: Freelance policy analyst and web developer. Worked, among others, as an external expert for CEPS (Centre for European Policy Studies) in the preparation of the H2020 project proposal Examining The Processes Of Legitimacy: Rule of Law, Fundamental Rights and Crises in the EU (EURULNET), within the Call CULT-COOP-01-2017 of the European Commission.
  • Cyprus 2019-: After a short stint in Germany, settling in the Cypriot countryside to become an ecosystem-conscious farmer, a real bread baker, a brewer, etc. Relevant information will be published periodically on this website, such as my recipes, inventions, methods (all shall be made available under a free/libre license).

Skills and education

These are non-exhaustive, while I generally prefer to let my work do the talking.

  • Academic: European Politics, Economics, and Law at the European University Cyprus.
  • Literary: Essay writing, conceptual analysis, interdisciplinary research, technical documentation.
  • Linguistic: Greek (native), English (professional), French (proficient), Spanish (intermediate), Portuguese (basic), German (beginner), Italian (intelligible).
  • Social: Good listener, extremely patient, calm, methodical, introverted, cooperative and generous (team player).
  • Technological: Front end web development (SCSS, HTML, Git, Gulp, WordPress, Jekyll, …), GNU/Linux power user, Free and Open Source Software contributor.

Main content indices on this website

Selected published works by topic

Books and standalone essays

Seminars

Political writings (the new politics blog)

Blog archive (the old blog)

Πολιτική αρθρογραφία (political writings in Greek)

Τρόπος ζωής (writings in Greek about the mode of living)

Code-related writings

Code-related screen casts

Code projects (external links)

  • Dotfiles (GitLab | Active). My custom desktop session on GNU/Linux. Managed with GNU Stow. This is a comprehensive repository that incorporates much of my work on free software.
  • Historiador WordPress Theme (GitHub | Active). A fork of the Twenty Seventeen WordPress theme, geared towards making a modern, full-featured personal website for use by Rui Tavares.
  • Nodelessness (GitLab | Active). Skeleton of a web development repo that does not depend on Nodejs. WORK IN PROGRESS.
  • Prot16 (GitHub | Stable). Colour schemes for highlighting code syntax. Each theme uses a 16-colour palette. It comes in light and dark variants.
  • Protesilaos Stavrou website (GitLab | Active). My website's source code. A prime example of using Jekyll to build the wide variety of pages on protesilaos.com.
  • Simple Terminal (GitLab | Active). Soft fork of the 'Simple Terminal' by suckless. Implements changes to colours and theming, font handling, and build-related modifications that are best suited for my custom desktop session (see my dotfiles).
  • Tempus Themes (GitLab | Active). Tempus is a collection of themes for Vim, text editors, and terminal emulators that are compliant at the very least with the WCAG AA accessibility standard for colour contrast
  • Tempus Themes Generator (GitLab | Active). Tool to build Tempus themes on demand. The epicentre of the Tempus themes project and where all the underlying code and schemes are to be found.
  • dmenus (GitLab | Active). A collection of my dmenu implementations. All those scripts have been copied over from my dotfiles. As such, they may not work outside my custom desktop session.

About my website

I have been posting on protesilaos.com since February 2011. This is the platform that presents in an organised and meaningful way all of my intellectual work. It is at the epicentre of all I do in terms of thinking, writing, and coding: a major content hub, hosting over 500 articles and featuring a growing number of publications on several fronts.

This website has evolved considerably over the years. It started off as a blog on Blogger, turner into a self-hosted WordPress site, and now exists as a set of files that are transformed into static pages with Jekyll. I have written from scratch every line of the underlying code base.

Note on contacting me

I prefer email over any other tool. I always reply in a timely fashion. If you have not heard from me, check your junk folder.

Please note that I do not use any social media and have no intention of joining one.

Optional. I use PGP encryption for emails. Refer to my contact page for details on my public key, or if you know the motions run the following command:

gpg --recv-keys A5B8A16D86ADECB21FB8D488BF48FD84FE21D72A