I was born in Brazil, and when I was 11 years old, I became very interested in software engineering as I started playing with a few Sinclair Spectrum and MSX computer systems. Soon after that, I watched a very interesting movie called War Games that really intrigued me. One year later, I was writing programs in Basic and Pascal just for fun and I am pretty sure I was one of the first ones back there to actually have a modem device (a 300bps one) back in 1987. I Got accepted into college in 1992, graduated with a degree in Computer Science in 1995, and got another degree in Analysis, Project and Management of IT Systems at PUC/RJ University in early 1998. Around that same year, in the mist of the Internet bubble, I got an offer to move to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The work was for Deloitte Consulting and they put me through many many projects - the experience was fantastic! In early 2004 I had the opportunity to become the CTO for a local startup called Transportopia where we built a very interesting in-vehicle computer system. Leaving and working in Pittsburgh is great and besides Deloitte and Transportopia, I also had the opportunity to work for American Eagle Outfitters and Lockerz.

Today I work for a Pittsburgh-based - very innovative - firm focused on Information Optimization. At Vivísimo, amazing tools are used to enable governments and enterprises to crawl, index, organize, visualize, research, analyze, and search data.

André Lessa
andre.lessa@lessaworld.com