From Greece to Canada – George Delaportas: Big Dreams Need Big Country

George Delaportas is writing a new language and needs four years of research, and about EUR 80,000, to compile its dictionary and syntax. This young Greek entrepreneur, now at home in Vancouver, hopes that crowd-funding – and some chutzpa – will allow him to get the job done.

Barely 29, Mr Delaportas is much the quintessential geek. He crossed the ocean westward in order to link up with his peers and exchange ideas on esoteric programming languages with professors and visionaries at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) and other universities and research centres. Mr Delaportas is also an entrepreneur. He is the founder of Pandoo TEK, a Vancouver-based company dedicated to the research and development of web-based technologies.

The programming language Mr Delaportas is currently working on aims to offer a single framework that unites the wildly different hardware components used to deliver, for example, cloud-based services. The language, provisionally named ALPHA, also seeks to provide a bridge between different operating systems and other computer code sets. As such, ALPHA is being designed as a way to interconnect basically everything that is being driven by bits and bytes.

Mr Delaportas does not believe in patches or half-measures: Behind the scenes, ALPHA will streamline, and thus speed up, the incessant flow of information over the Internet.

Contrary to popular belief – and, perhaps, to their geeky appearance – IT developers are a passionate bunch, and Mr Delaportas is no exception to this rule. “The bigger the challenge, the greater the passion required to overcome it. This inner-drive is what gets things done and makes the magic happen.”

In his quest for über-connectivity there is little place for modesty: “At Pandoo TEK we don’t just invest in the future, we actually build it.” For Mr Delaportas, writing code comes naturally. He has been doing that for the past fifteen years – over half his life – and allows him to strive for perfection. “The holy grail of computer languages is to find the least words while doing the most. It has an element of elegance too. Well written code is a bit like a symphony in which there is not a single superfluous note.”

Greece was too small and distant a place for Mr Delaportas to develop his ideas and see them gain traction. He has no regrets moving to Canada where he is now surrounded by like-minded. He has colleagues from England, Holland, Bosnia, Serbia and many other countries. “We all came here for similar reasons, sharing the same idea: to get some ground-breaking IT work done and, in the process, possibly change the world a bit.”