About Me
The story behind the stories.
Writer, developer, podcaster — and a firm believer that the best stories change lives.
Panos Sakalakis
I’m a 31-year-old writer and web developer with 18 years of experience based in a small town somewhere in Northern Greece. I’m a 5:00 AM person, and that’s the time when I build my fictional worlds.
My work includes sci-fi novels, practical guidebooks for authors, and open-source tools for the writing community. I believe that stories (fictional or practical) have the power to change lives.
My Journey
How I Got Here
From a 14-year-old kid building websites for a gaming PC to a professional web developer and then a published author, every chapter taught me something, and I can’t wait to see what will happen in the next ones.
Chapter 1
I’m 14 years old, and we just moved into a house. That’s right, a freaking house! Finally, I couldn’t stand living in a car for even a second more. Sucks to be homeless. The government also gave us two small notebooks for free, but we don’t have an internet connection, so they’re basically useless.
So… I just hacked my neighbor’s Wi-Fi password, and I did that with a simple Android app I found. Crazy. But we now have internet, and that’s the only thing we wanted.
It’s 4:00 am in the morning, and everyone’s asleep, but I’m looking at some Blogger blogs, and I see ads everywhere. These folks make money just by sharing content; maybe I can do the same?
Alright, looks like you can build free blogs in Google’s Blogspot, and you can even sign up for AdSense, but my mother will have to sign up for me.
Great news! A friend of my mother’s made a deal with me: Build him a website for his sailing boat, and he’ll buy me a gaming PC that costs at least $1,000. A FREAKING GAMING PC! Can you believe it? I don’t, but I’ll give it a try anyway.
Chapter 2
I’ve built a few blogs, tested all the solutions, and I found out about WordPress, which is an extremely powerful platform. I already got paid twice for two different clients who wanted me to do basic design changes to their Blogspot blogs, like changing their colors and fonts, adding new elements, removing things, moving things around, and little tasks like that. Who knew that CSS would be such a valuable language?
A few months have passed, and with a friend from school, we are planning to build a WordPress blog, a magazine-type blog, specifically for men. You know, men’s stuff? I like writing about tech, movies, and games, and he likes anything that includes eating healthy and exercising. We’ll see how that goes.
We found a guy with a hosting platform. He gave us a server completely for free to build our website upon it, and if we like it, we could choose one of his monthly plans, which are fairly affordable. He seems like a cool guy.
Great fucking news: We just hit 250,000 visitors this month, and we’ve been making over $250 per day just from ads. Holy…
So…. that cool guy who offered us the server? Although we paid him for months ahead, he called us a month ago and told us that we had only one choice: Sign an official agreement that we were giving him 50% of the site, or shut it down completely. We said no. He shut it down. We were just able to take everything back, both the domain and all of our files, after we were ready to sue him.
I’ve also written my first articles for a local magazine in Northern Greece, and they loved it so much that they want me to write even more for the next month’s edition. They also gave me a full page to advertise my blog.
A year has passed, but we were unable to bring back all the traffic, so I guess we’ll be moving to other projects.
Chapter 3
I learned how to set up my own servers and even built a web hosting website. I rented a huge dedicated server for my websites, and I have enough room to fill it with clients. In the end, they’ll be paying for all the server’s expenses for me, but for them, it will be the most affordable plan they can get. Also, learning PHP is like constantly swimming but never seeing land.
I also launched Inkstory.gr a few months ago. It’s going really great. It’s a blog that teaches people how to start their own blogs, along with a few other tech-related tutorials. People keep contacting me and hiring me to design their blogs, and I couldn’t be happier. The server now has over 27 clients, and the number keeps increasing day by day.
I’ve also launched my first podcast in Greek, called “The Blogging Dispatch”. The first season went really well, and the second one even better. All the episodes in the second season are interviews with other folks, and all of them are great people with whom I had so much fun recording.
Ummm… I just got on IMDb… How? I have no clue. Someone from my audience told me that he didn’t know podcasters had their own IMDb pages and asked me how I did that. I didn’t.
Oh, did I mention that I just opened my first company and I’m now officially a freelancer? Yey!
Chapter 4
On November 30, 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT. Five minutes were enough to understand that my career as a web developer was coming to an end. Servers are coming to an end. So many careers are coming to an end. This is perfect, because life just gave me the only reason I needed to finally take the biggest decision of my life and chase my dream of becoming a sci-fi author.
Weird stuff. It’s 4:00 am, and while I’m waiting for my coffee machine to do its magic, I can’t stop thinking of a dream I saw. Man, it was so cool, I can’t stop thinking how cool it would have been as a movie or a TV show.
I’ve written 26,000 words in one day. I had to. I had to keep this idea alive, especially now with my career being at risk, and its days numbered. I started writing the book at 4:25 am, and it’s now 21:46 pm. Couldn’t stop. My hands couldn’t leave the keyboard, and I couldn’t stop typing. For the first time in my life, I feel like I’ve finally found something better than blogging. Something that brought back all the love I had for writing, and triple it.
It’s the first day of 2024. I just emailed all my clients and told them that I would not be renewing the server and technical support again. I thank them all for all those years, and I couldn’t believe how difficult it was going to be. Most of them called me, congratulated me, and then proceeded to ask me the same question, “But you’ll keep us, right?”. Right… Not a change to continue wasting my time in this career, not with the idea I have.
It’s the first day of 2026. Remember that book? It’s now a 82,000 words novel, and I believe I’ll be finishing it just before my birthday, and publish it on Amazon the exact same day, on July 11, 2026.
April 16, 2026 – Just received the first feedback from a few people. They found a few mistakes, but thankfully, nothing too serious and nothing I can’t fix within hours. I can’t believe I’ve made those mistakes, but I guess that’s what’s happening when you’re human, and you’re trying something for the first time. I’ve also been working on my personal website, which is the one that I’ll be promoting my book on, and I’ve already written and published two books on Amazon (a guidebook and five Christmas tales for kids that I had sitting around in my archive). I spent a lot of time getting these two ready, but it was the best experience I could get with Amazon KDP, and I learned how it works. I also got inspired by Dominic from Legend Fiction a lot, and from his videos, I found myself pushing myself a little more every time. It’s nice to see other authors talk about their experiences and give tips to beginners. I wish I had the money to join their community, but for now, I’m completely broke. No clients, no servers, no nothing. It’s just me, a few bucks per month that I make from Medium, a few donations here and there on Gumroad for The Novelist vault, and that’s about it. If the book won’t make any sales, I’ll have to leave my town and get myself a seasonal job. Maybe as a programmer, maybe as a waiter, we’ll see. One thing’s for sure: I’ll continue writing until I finally become a full-time author.
