About the author

My name is Maria Varmazis. It’s nice to meet you.
Με λένε Μαρία Βαρμάζη. Χαίρω πολύ.
私はバルマギス・マリヤと申します。よろしくお願いします。

On my business card, I’m a Content Strategy Manager.

You can find me at the intersection of form and function

I live in Boston. I got my B.A. in journalism and Japanese from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst a while back, but only after spending two years at Columbia University’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences studying computer science. A geek hybrid, you could say.

I’m the kind of person who takes things apart to find out how they work. This is how I taught myself HTML in the early-mid 1990s—by taking apart other websites and shaping the raw code into something of my own, I eventually learned how to code HTML, and later CSS, DHTML, PHP and some JavaScript.

I studied abroad three times during my college career. I spent about two months in Greece on the Cycladic island of Paros in 2002 on an intensive Greek language program. In 2004, I was a homestay/exchange student for three months in Japan, mainly in the Nagahama area of Shiga-ken studying both Japanese language and traditional bunraku theater. In 2006, I was a student at the Sorbonne in Paris, where I studied French language and history for six months.

Topics and activities I enjoy that are also useful for impressing people at cocktail parties:

• Art history. I feel very much at home an art museum—generally when I’m in a new city, the local art museum is my first stop. My favorite artist? Matisse, no question.
• Japanese, French and Greek language and culture studies. I’ve studied all three of these languages and cultures throughout my life, and those studies continue. I’m not fluent in any of them, though I’m at intermediate levels for each.
• Crochet and knitting. I love how this has kind of come in vogue with so many people in the last decade or so when this was kind of relegated to the world of days gone by. Thankfully we live in a world where activities like knitting are done for fun and not out of drudgery and necessity, and I do greatly enjoy making things with my hands!
• Road biking. Okay, this doesn’t impress anybody. I am not a speed demon, I prefer touring to speed. Granted, I’m not very good at it, but I love it and that’s really all that matters. And now that I have a new, beautiful Surly Crosscheck I hope to do a lot more of it.
• Snowboarding. I am a total novice and have face-planted on the bunny hills more times than I’d like to admit, but it is a whole hell of a lot of fun.