GreeceJS #53: AI Coding workflows and local first apps

Hola good people,

We are thrilled to announce our next GreeceJS meetup, happening on 18th of March, from 18:00 to 20:30, at a brand new venue in the center of Athens hosted by Yodeck!

⚠️ Important: This venue is new for our community and has a capacity of 50 people, so make sure to secure your spot early.

📍 Location: Starttech Ventures — 1 Lykourgou Street, Athens 10551
Just a short walk from Omonia Square.

Please note: the talks in this meetup will be conducted in Greek (EL).
Our speakers this time are Thanos Karagiannis and Spiros Martzoukos, two engineers with decades of combined experience across the JavaScript ecosystem, product engineering, and modern web architectures.
Our event is proudly sponsored by Yodeck — a fast-growing SaaS company revolutionizing digital signage.
As always, the event will be live-streamed via our YouTube channel, and we’ll be sharing the link in our Slack / Instagram, so make sure to join us there!
We look forward to seeing you @ Yodeck 🎉

Event Agenda

18:00 – 18:30
Networking & cold beverages
Come early, grab a drink, and meet the community!

18:30 – 19:15
Thanos Karagiannis – “I Was Wrong About AI Coding” (EL)
Staff Engineer at Causaly | GreeceJS Co-organizer
Thanos is a software engineer with 15+ years of experience, fluent across the JavaScript stack — from React frontends to Node.js services. He currently works as a Staff Engineer at Causaly, focusing on backend systems.
He’s also a GreeceJS co-organizer. Outside of work, you’ll find him fueled by coffee and out on his bike.

Most of us started with AI coding tools the same way — autocomplete, boilerplate, small refactors. Helpful, but not transformative. It was easy to be skeptical.
But something shifted.
This talk is a personal journey — from dismissing AI coding as “fancy autocomplete” to integrating it into real engineering workflows. Thanos will share what actually works, what doesn’t, and why the engineers who benefit most from AI aren’t the ones who write code faster, but the ones who make better decisions faster.

19:15 – 19:30
A word from our sponsor: Yodeck
Yodeck is a fast-growing Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) company that is laser-focused on disrupting the $23B digital signage industry. Yodeck’s affordable, easy-to-use, and feature-rich solution has been developed to democratize digital signage and empower any and every business around the world.
Yodeck was first introduced in 2016 and now powers over 220,000 screens across every type of business — from restaurants and retail stores to schools, stadiums, and conference halls.
Check out their openings!

19:45 – 20:30
Spiros Martzoukos – Local-First Apps: Instant UX without the Spinner
Spiros Martzoukos is a Senior Product Engineer at Checkly with 20+ years of experience spanning full-stack engineering, product design, and product management. He has worked across startups and scale-ups including Contentful, Prisma, and Clerk, and is the founder of Makkuro, a next-gen project management tool for digital product teams.
He is passionate about building lean, user-first products end-to-end — and making sure your AI apps work reliably well.

In this talk, Spiros shows how local-first architecture can eliminate every spinner from your app, delivering instant sub-100ms interactions that feel like magic while dramatically reducing infrastructure costs.
He will break down the seven principles behind this approach and share practical lessons about where it shines (B2B SaaS and productivity tools) and where today’s tooling still needs to mature.

21:00
BeerJS 🍻
We’ll wrap up with informal chats over beers at a nearby place — details will be shared via Slack!

Venue Information
Starttech Ventures
1 Lykourgou Street, Athens 10551
Doorbell: 03# Starttech Ventures

🚨 Important reminder: The venue fits 50 attendees, so please RSVP early.

Getting There
By Metro
Take Metro Line 1 (Green) or Line 2 (Red) to Omonia Station.
Exit toward Panepistimiou / 3rd Septemvriou.
From the exit, it’s about a 2-minute walk.
By Bus
Multiple bus lines stop at or near Omonia Square. From there, follow the short walking route to Lykourgou Street.
By Taxi
Ask to be dropped off at “Lykourgou 1, near Omonia Square.”
Don't forget to follow us on our socials for more news about the event, updates, and prizes! 🎉