Author, Developer, ConsultanT, Educator

George likes to say that he, "Works on networking and operating system code for fun and profit." Writing machine code, building hardware and teaching computing since his teens, his first paid programming gig was hacking DBase III code for an insurance company while still in High School. He published his first piece of commercial software, an audio digitizer for the then popular Amiga computer, while still in college.

Standing firmly at the intersection of industry and academia and due to his top ranking in the development of open source software, George has worked on research projects with several leading Universities, including: the University of Cambridge, University of California at Santa Cruz, and the University of Twente in the Netherlands. He has spent over 30 years producing commercial software for companies such as Wind River Systems, who, along with NASA, put a bit of his code on Mars with each succssful landing there since the Pathfinder probe in 1997.

During his tenure as a software engineer he has continued to teach in both academic and professional settings. While at Yahoo Inc. in the early 2000s, developed the "Paranoid University" a complete training program for technical and non-technical employees covering all aspect of computer and information security, covering everything from the physical layer of data centers to the logical layers of software, law and finance.

He is the author of two leading books on operating systems, the latest co-authored with Marshall Kirk McKusick and Robert N. M. Watson of _The Design and implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System 2nd Ed.

For over fifteen years he has been the columnist better known as Kode Vicious, producing the most widely read column in both of ACM's premier flagship magazines, "Queue" and "Communications of the ACM". A collection of his work was published in 2020 by Pearson, under the title _The Kollected Kode Vicious_ with an introduction by Don Knuth. George's work with the ACM has spanned nearly two decades, working not only on Queue but also as part of their Practitioner Board, helping ACM to braoden its reach into the larger, non Academic world. As part of his work for pracitioners he started ACM's only practitioner focused conference, Applicative.

His work on open source started back in college, where he wrote various programs for early microcomputers, and shared them under a public domain license, the predecessor to today's world of open source licenses. His early experiences with open source software included time at labs at MIT, where did some hacking while the original GPL was being crafted. A brush with the UNIX group at Berekeley in the early 90s led him to favor Berkeley's development and licensing model (The BSD License) and he has made the majority of his open source contributions under this license and with BSD related communities.

George has been a FreeBSD committer for nearly 20 years, and currently serves on the elected Core team which helps manage the overall project. From 2012 until 202 he was a Director of the FreeBSD Foundation, and served one term as its President.

For commercial clients he has worked on everything from high speed trading on Wall Street, securing device manufacturing in China, deploying highly accurate network time protocols in both finance and astronomy.

His breadth of knowledge has made him a sought after speaker and consultant, explaining complex topics such as computer security, the Internet, computer based time keeping, and software engineering practices to both technical and non-technical audiences alike. His ability to bridge any knowledge or communitcation gap between domain experts and an audience is made apparent at his talks and when he is called upon to chair meetings among groups with radically differing backgrounds.

Having spent years working and living in different cultures and speaking several languages, including Japanese, Dutch, French and more recently Mandarin, has given him a global perspective which he uses to move difficult projects with many stake holders to completion, whether that's in Silicon Valley, New York, London, Amsterdam, Tokyo or Taipei, all places that he continues to call home.