Vasilis Skourtis is an engineer that applies reverse engineering constantly in order to have a look at the source code of the world. Currently, he provides his services as an Information Security Officer for the Hellenic Electricity Distribution Network Operator (HEDNO), after accepting the challenge to protect human rights and national assets against an invisible enemy in an undeclared CyberWar. For more than a decade, he was developing web applications in various industries, like betting, hospitality, insurance, and projects for the European Union.
Academically, he graduated from the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering of the Technical University of Crete(TUC), while he holds 2 postgraduate diplomas in Engineering Management (TUC) and in Information Systems (UOA).
He thinks that a driver that drives in the same way for 30 years remains stagnant, repeating the same mistakes without being aware of them, while a driver that races learns from the competition and evolves. Therefore, he joins competitions occasionally to improve himself. During that romantic journey, he found himself lucky enough to be part of the winning team of the Threat Modeling Connect Spring 2023 Hackathon, member of the runners-up team (2nd) of the Startup Weekend 2012 (Athens Microsoft Facilities), as well as being 1st in Web Applications Design and Development and Top50 overall during a written exams competition ran by the Supreme Council for Personnel Selection of Greece(>15000applicants, 2022).
Vasilis Skourtis is an engineer that applies reverse engineering constantly in order to have a look at the source code of the world. Currently, he provides his services as an Information Security Officer for the Hellenic Electricity Distribution Network Operator (HEDNO), after accepting the challenge to protect human rights and national assets against an invisible enemy in an undeclared CyberWar. For more than a decade, he was developing web applications in various industries, like betting, hospitality, insurance, and projects for the European Union.
Academically, he graduated from the Department of Electronic & Computer Engineering of the Technical University of Crete(TUC), while he holds 2 postgraduate diplomas in Engineering Management (TUC) and in Information Systems (UOA).
He thinks that a driver that drives in the same way for 30 years remains stagnant, repeating the same mistakes without being aware of them, while a driver that races learns from the competition and evolves. Therefore, he joins competitions occasionally to improve himself. During that romantic journey, he found himself lucky enough to be part of the winning team of the Threat Modeling Connect Spring 2023 Hackathon, member of the runners-up team (2nd) of the Startup Weekend 2012 (Athens Microsoft Facilities), as well as being 1st in Web Applications Design and Development and Top50 overall during a written exams competition ran by the Supreme Council for Personnel Selection of Greece(>15000applicants, 2022).
What is logging, in one word? Cost. Undeniably.
Development cost. Performance cost. Operational cost. Maintenance cost.
But is logging truly costly, or merely expensive?
As with education, the answer depends on outcomes, and those outcomes only become visible over time.
By approaching logging the way we approach learning, we can transform a controversial expense into an operational necessity.
We employ a discreet but continuous source of insight across business, development, architecture and design, security, and incident response.
When designed intentionally, logs tell stories about both system and human behaviors.
They reveal how our services actually run and where assumptions quietly fail.
In that sense, observability through logging is not a sunk cost, but a high-return investment in understanding and decision-making, potentially offering a multi-aspect business intelligence solution.
In this talk, we explore how to extract real value from logging by mapping it to three universal dimensions of learning:
-Things we know that we know
-Things we know that we do not know
-Things we do not know that we do not know
