About Niko Sagiadinos – The Person Behind SmilControl & GarlicSignage
· 2 min read
My father smuggled supplies for Greek partisans, and my mother survived two near-executions as a child. I grew up in a house where that was just history, not heroism. I ended up with a deep distrust of concentrated power and a pull toward systems nobody can pull the plug on.
My open source projects live under GarlicSignage. Professional support is available through SmilControl. You can run it yourself or have me run it for you — on Hetzner servers in Germany, not on AWS or whatever Google is rebranding this quarter.
The only thing genuinely unusual about my setup: you can mix CMS and player from different vendors. Nobody else in this industry allows that. They consider it a threat. I consider it basic respect for the customer.
I’ve been online since 1993. Almost everything I know came from the internet, from open source communities, from reading other people’s code. That debt doesn’t go away. Building in the open is how I pay it back.
Outside of code: I’ve lived in Greece, traveled through Africa and the Caribbean, and spent years on Corfu before Asia pulled me east. I was a competitive breakdancer as a teenager, a professional DJ for years after that, and somewhere in between I forgot I’d always wanted to explore Asia. Thailand reminded me.
I live polyamorously, move well on a dance floor, and play piano badly enough to still enjoy it. I wore dreadlocks for 13 years — partly because no other hairstyle worked on me, partly because it was an efficient filter for people I didn’t want to work with anyway.
I code in obsessive bursts. I travel.
If you want to work together: SmilControl · GarlicSignage