Personal

Xbox Series X – First game

Installed the new Xbox Series X. 4K resolution. Surround sound. New Elite 2 controller. All sorts of fancy tech. What’s the first game I play? Ghosts’n Goblins, released in 1985, hosted in an Xbox 360 virtual machine in my new Xbox console 

This is the game I was playing for hours when my dad came to find me in the arcade place. I was spending all my time there, even though I wasn’t allowed to (plus stealing money to play games). I hid in the restroom. He knew. I was in my very early teens. He didn’t want to embarrass me in front of my friends so he left without confronting me. He instead brought a home computer a week later. He first borrowed a Spectrum ZX from a friend to test my interest. A week later, I had my own Schneider 464 (with a tape). I got hooked and have been ever since 

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about