About

Hi there! You have landed on the blog of Christos Matskas, a developer, speaker, writer, Microsoft Program Manager for Microsoft Identity and geek. I currently live  with my family in Seattle, WA. My goal in life is to become great at my job as a technical Program Manager, be an excellent father and husband and a geeky geek. Scrap that, I don’t want to be great, I want to be awesome! This blog is the testimony of my journey to reach that goal. As I grow, I document my problems, troubles, obstacles, bugs and worries and then I do my best to come up with a solution, a hack or a cool trick. And then I blog about it!

Within these pages you may find the answer to your problem or read something that helps you come up with your own solution. If that’s the case, then I will be happy I helped one more person in the world: YOU. In some cases, you may disagree or find my code ridiculous. Feel free to let me know and I will do my best to fix it. Oftentimes, I find my code ridiculous too; especially when I look back to something I wrote  yesterday, 6 months or a year ago. And this is great, because it means I’m a bit better.

Background

I have been working as a developer for over 15 years mainly focusing on the .NET    stack. I have a degree in Software Engineering and an MSc in Advance Computer Networking. Over the years I've had the opportunity to work on some really cool and high profile projects with great companies such as MarkIT, Strathclyde University, Amor/Lockheed Martin, Ignis Asset Management, Barclays etc. However, my love for coding extends well beyond my day job. It's not uncommon to find me coding until midnight after everyone's gone to bed. I work, maintain and contribute to a number of Open Source projects. My GitHub profile                   is cmatskas where you can find some of the fun projects I've worked through the years as well as code snippets.

Career

I currently work for Microsoft as a Program Manager for the Microsoft Identity division, in the Developer Evangelist team. In effect, anything that has to do with Azure Active Directory development, including authentication/authorization, MS Graph, Managed Identities etc, is part of my domain. I'm making a conscious effort to expand beyond .NET so there's a good chance you'll see blog post on various other languages and technology stacks. I still get to do a lot with the               community and open source as part of my job description and I contantly learn about new things. It's a dream come true so if you ever hoped to work for Microsoft and you feel that what I do is something you like, feel free to reach out to me and I'll do my best to make your dream come true.

Community Contributions

All my OSS projects are available on GitHub and are available to download through NuGet. I make a conscious effort to contribute to other OSS projects whenever my schedule allows it. Apart from coding, I also blog (really?) and write posts for Microsoft. You can find more about past and upcoming                     conferences and User Group talks here.  

Additional Info

Always on the cutting edge of technology, I’m one of the first people to download and run Alpha and Beta software resulting in a lot of fun, frustration, laughter, excitement, tears and swearing (when the kids are asleep or can’t hear me).  I love lifting weights, snowboarding, gaming on my PS4./XBOX and of course spending time with my family. My weekends are totally dedicated to my wife and our two girls. My wife ensures I don’t forget this and keeps all electronic devices at a safe distance.

Summary

This is my exciting journey trying to learn something new and useful every day. There's still an insurmountable amount of knowledge lying ahead of me. I urge you to join me on my quest to grow both professionally and personally. You can find me on twitter, or you can email me should you have coding, Identity or Azure related questions or need help with anything.