Hi, I’m George. In Greek-speaking circles, I go by something that sounds a bit like Yioryos or Yiorgos.
I spent my formative years in Athens, Greece.
My first real contact with a computer was around 1998, when I got my first Intel Pentium III tower. Until then, I was a game console addict, but once that computer arrived, I never looked back.
I spent countless hours experimenting with various software, hardware, and operating systems. At the time, I was convinced that to be considered “cool” in the computer circles, I had to be able to install and run Linux successfully (watched too many - now considered cult - hacker Hollywood movies).
FreeBSD was my first crush. Its stability, centralized design, and excellent documentation won me over. It was also the first *nix operating system I managed to install successfully. Earlier attempts with Red Hat and SUSE didn’t go quite as smoothly. (these damn display drivers!)
During my student years came another pivotal moment: my first contact with web development. I became convinced that a dating platform was THE missing piece of the Greek-speaking web, and I set out to bring people together through a “missed connections” website.
I was fascinated by the instant feedback loop of web development — seeing something you build come to life right in front of you with just HTML, CSS, and a bit of CMS-specific PHP.
I was hooked.
My professional journey in tech began in Brussels, Belgium in the early 2010s, first as a junior web developer, doing mostly HTML, CSS and jQuery work. These were the years of the IE7 dominance - with Firefox slowly gaining traction - and I learned a lot about cross-browser compatibility the hard way. The CSS specification was still evolving, and I had to deal with a lot of quirks and hacks to make things work.
Corporate-scale CSS was a nightmare back then. Large monolithic stylesheets with thousands of lines of code, no modularity, no componentization, and a lot of duplicated code. It was a mess, but it taught me the importance of maintainable and scalable code as well as following the work of pioneers like Nicole Sullivan and Harry Roberts. (CSS methodologies were just starting to emerge back then.)
The popularization of JavaScript frameworks like AngularJS, Backbone.js, and a bit later ReactJS and VueJS in the mid-2010s found me moving to Berlin, Germany, where I worked as a front-end developer in popular startups and scale-ups.
After 5 amazing years, I relocate to Athens and transition to full-stack roles, working with NodeJS and Express on the backend.
I work as an independent consultant, helping both startups and established companies build web applications.
Software engineering is for me not just writing code; it’s about solving problems, creating value, and continuously learning and improving.
When I’m not coding, I enjoy spending time with my son and wife, exploring the outdoors, and indulging in my passion for biking, hiking, and pointless browsing Netflix in the hope of finding something interesting to watch. (usually unsuccessfully)