South America and my Portuguese Roots

I was born in Brazil, and when I was 11 years old, I became very interested in software engineering after noticing the Sinclair Spectrum and MSX computer models that started being sold over there. Soon after that, I watched a very interesting movie called War Games that intrigued me. One year later, I was writing programs in Basic and Pascal just for fun. I am pretty sure I was one of the first back there to actually have a modem (a 300bps one) back in 1987. Entered 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 at age 23. 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. Almost one year and a half later, I briefly went back to Deloitte to deliver a one-off project but soon was joining a Pittsburgh-based - very innovative - firm called Vivísimo. At Vivísimo, they have amazing tools that enable enterprises to crawl, index, organize, visualize, research, analyze, and search their data. Having had the opportunity to wear many hats, I ended up collecting a lot of knowledge related to the inner workings of search systems and more specifically, knowledge about the overall Enterprise Search marketplace. Today I'm a Technical Product Manager working for American Eagle Outfitters focusing exclusively on our new brand, 77kids.com. Come shop with us! ;-)

André Lessa