Meet the SessionStack Crew: Georgis Andonis, Senior Engineer

With this “SessionStack Crew” series we’d like to present the people behind the company. As they are the key reason SessionStack is alive, expanding, upgrading, and serving product teams across the globe with awesome insights.

In this post, we are happy to talk with: Georgis Andonis, Senior Engineer at SessionStack.

Who are you in your personal life?

A sightseer with a good sense of humor. I like visiting cities with rich history, beautiful architecture and tasty food. Spending time with my family and friends, and swimming in the turquoise waters of Greece are the things that keep my battery charged. I’m also interested in graphic design and photography.

Can you share a picture of you doing your favorite hobby?

How did you choose software engineering as a profession?

Since very young I have been good at maths. I entered the High School of Mathematics in Lovech (my hometown). Until my graduation, I’ve been participating in a lot of math competitions. I started my career as a freelance graphic designer in my late teenage years. After every design project, I was always curious about how static pages go live and become functional. Therefore, after my high school graduation, I entered Sofia University (Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics) to study Software Engineering. Along with it, I graduated in Software Engining at Telerik Academy. It didn’t take long to start my first job as a software developer and actually create functional pages and applications myself.

How did you find out about SessionStack and what excites you about the company?

I and Lachezar (co-founder of SessionStack) are very close friends since high school. We both went to Sofia University. There Lachezar met Alexander (the CEO of SessionStack), and soon after that, we started spending time together. One day they shared with me they were working on their own project called SessionStack and asked me if I can help with some design work. The idea of their product really excited me, both as a developer and designer. The next day I started working on the designs. I was impressed how the session recording is so pixel-perfect and smooth and still isn’t a regular video. During that time I was a full-stack developer at a US-based startup. But after a few months of working with my friends on that designs, I decided to join SessionStack.

What is your favorite company project you’ve been working on?

Maintaining a smooth recording and replaying process of the sessions is one of the biggest challenges we’re working on. Considering the world of digital products is getting more and more complex. We’re capturing almost all the things that happen on a user’s browser — including DOM mutations, user activities like mouse moves, clicks, scrolls, all network requests, and console information like errors, warnings, etc. The recording should not affect the user experience, so our library needs to be extremely performant, covering all browsers (even the old ones).

Once we have all the data from the user’s browser, the replay is the next step, where we combine everything together into a pixel-perfect session replay. On top of this, we have a live replay where the actual delay between the user’s screen and our player is below 2 seconds. The live replay has features to draw on the user’s screen and to take control over their mouse and keyboard after permission is granted. It is really amazing how fast and smooth the process of session replay works.

What do you think about product analytics from the optics of your position?

I think product analytics tools will keep expanding on the market. Most of the developers are used to monitoring the exceptions and their count, or numbers like uptime. Nowadays “exceptionless” software and “100%” uptime cannot guarantee your customers are happy.

But the new generation of product analytics tools that provide qualitative insights (like SessionStack) can show you “visually” how something crashes, or point out a flaw in the UX. They furthermore suggest how you can improve your product, increasing your customer satisfaction and conversion rate. As an engineer, I’m using SessionStack to easily understand our customers’ problems and proactively resolve their issues.

What do you think of the SessionStack team, and the company’s culture?

The team is great. I’ve spent so much time in the company, it’s like my second home. I like that everybody is an expert in their field. It’s a pleasure and really easy to work with all SessionStackers. We all are good friends and everybody is supportive if you need something. Even in the hard times (there are such in each startup) we manage to keep our heads up and keep on the process of building something big.

What advice would you give to people joining a scaling product company?

There isn’t software that is free of bugs. Focus on building fast the things that will bring value to the customers to validate your idea. Then iterate to make your product great.

Tell us an interesting fact about you?

The SessionStack logo is created by me. I believe it will be my most recognizable logo design project :).

Bonus question. Would you share with us a fun meme?

Follow up with the other posts from the series SessionStack Crew.

Interested in joining our team? See the open positions here.