John Kapantzakis

Senior Frontend Engineer

Thessaloniki, Greece (UTC+2)·kapantzak@gmail.com·kapantzakis.gr·linkedin.com/in/johnkapantzakis·github.com/kapantzak

Senior frontend engineer with 12+ years of experience building web products, currently on the React frontend of Netdata Cloud: AI-assisted observability, Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration and performance work on data-intensive UIs. Contributor to Hotwire Turbo, co-organiser of SKG JS, the Thessaloniki JavaScript community.

Experience

Senior Software Engineer, Netdata

Feb 2023 – Present

Open-source, real-time observability platform. Frontend of Netdata Cloud, a large, data-intensive React application.

  • Built frontend capabilities for Netdata's AI assistant, evolving it from a basic chat interface to persistent LLM conversations powered by Netdata-specific tools and investigation workflows. Also implemented frontend support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), allowing users to connect external tooling.
  • Optimized data processing and React rendering to improve performance and eliminate unnecessary remounts.
  • Cut reported frontend CI runtime by about 60% through Jest test sharding and test-reliability fixes.
  • Built the foundational Dynamic Configurations UI and continued evolving it to support complex, dynamically generated configuration forms, using the react-jsonschema-form library.
  • Helped build end-to-end AI Insights investigation reports (generation, rendering, scheduling) and contributed to enterprise identity features: SCIM, SSO, role and room mappings, and label-driven room membership.

Senior Frontend Developer, Adzuna

Feb 2022 – Jan 2023

Job search engine used by 15M+ jobseekers a month across 20 countries.

  • Built Labour Market Intelligence, a new data product, from zero to launch in under a year on Next.js, in a team of three (one product manager, two developers).
  • Built the product's interactive charts and maps with Apache ECharts, visualising hiring demand, salaries and trends across regions.
  • Shipped search, grouping and filtering by location, sector, salary and other dimensions, so users could explore labour-market data for multiple countries.

Software Engineer, Skroutz

Jun 2020 – Jan 2022

One of Greece's leading e-commerce marketplaces. Partners department: tooling for merchants.

  • Developed and maintained the merchant platform (orders, payments, daily operations) with Ruby on Rails and Hotwire Turbo server rendering, using React for selected views.
  • Contributed two features to Hotwire Turbo that shipped in Turbo 7 and were credited in the release announcement: the turbo:frame-render event and target elements on fetch events.
  • Published two articles on the Skroutz engineering blog, on progressive data loading in React and lazy loading with Hotwire.

Full Stack Developer, EpsilonNet

Sep 2014 – May 2020

Greek business-software company. Epsilon ESS, an employee self-service web platform on ASP.NET and C#.

  • Progressed from junior web designer to full-stack developer responsible for the product's frontend, implementing features end to end from C# backend to TypeScript frontend.
  • Introduced TypeScript, webpack and Redux-managed asynchronous views into a legacy ASP.NET Web Forms frontend, and added unit tests on both sides (Mocha and Chai, xUnit).
  • Built a Node.js and Handlebars CLI that generates the boilerplate for a new form: the ASP.NET user control and async handler, the TypeScript page script and Redux state, and the C# data models.

Projects

hoohooli.gr, Headless e-commerce storefront

Dec 2025 – Present

Family business: a live Greek e-shop for handmade baby and toddler clothes. A WordPress/WooCommerce monolith split into a Next.js storefront and a headless WooCommerce backend.

  • Moved the product catalogue to a Next.js 16 App Router storefront on Vercel. Kept checkout, payments and accounts on WordPress behind an API subdomain, restyled to match the new UI.
  • Carried the cart across both apps through a server-side proxy to the CoCart API, with a cart-key handoff to WooCommerce checkout.
  • Cut product API payloads from ~2.4 MB to ~400 KB so they fit the Next.js data cache. Added indexable category routes, a live sitemap and Product/Breadcrumb structured data.

Open Source & Community

SKG JS, Thessaloniki JavaScript Meetup, Co-organiser

Apr 2025 – Present

Organising meetups and talks for the JavaScript community in Thessaloniki. Speaker: "What's new in React 19", SKG JS Meetup #3, Apr 2025.

Selected Writing

Skills

LanguagesJavaScript, TypeScript, C#, Ruby, HTML, CSS

FrontendReact, Next.js, Redux, Hotwire Turbo, webpack

BackendNode.js, ASP.NET / ASP.NET Core, Ruby on Rails, SQL Server, WordPress / WooCommerce (headless)

Testing & deliveryJest, Testing Library, RSpec, Mocha, xUnit, CI pipelines, Git

AIClaude Code and other AI coding agents, custom skills, CLAUDE.md / AGENTS.md project instructions

Education

MSc in Applied Informatics, University of Macedonia

2015 – 2018

MSc in Informatics and Management, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

2008 – 2010

BSc in Economic Science, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki

2001 – 2006