Welcome to my page!

My name is sendai, Andras Spitzer and this website is about my professional life which covers a broad spectrum of computer science. I’ve held a variety of titles in companies of massively different sizes ranging from startups to fortune 500 corporate environments, and I’ve failed a few bootstrapped startups as well. I’m not happy to fail them, but I’m proud to learn from the mistakes and keep trying, improving.

I’m an engineer, builder and investor at heart, the pillars of my experience are extremely meticulous observational skills, which comes from my childhood as an assembly programmer and reverse engineer on C64, later Amiga and PC.

On this page you’ll get a chronological display of my computer science background, which helps to understand what drives me on my journey in this life. Besides this high level intro, you’ll also find on this page my resume, a few RCAs I wrote over the years (redacted and anonymized), certificates I’ve earned, awards I’ve received. None of these are testiments of my successes, rather they’re testiments of how lucky I was to get these opportunities.

Early years

Grew up in Soviet occupied Hungary in 80’s, an unusual time in history when it was illegal to import advanced computers to the eastern block in fear of using them for military purposes. Despite this law, a few Hungarian families found ways to sneak in a home computer somehow, usually from Germany. Even though we already had limited access to basic computers in schools, my world took a radical turn when my father brought a Commodore 64 to our home in 1985. I was 8 years old at the time, and getting access to this computer piqued my curiosity and put me on a track to learn everything about it.

I was enamoured with computer games to begin with, but right away I also dreamed about writing my own game. Soviet occcupied Hungary was gray literally and figuratively with no perspective, computer programming showed a creative opportunity where the limit is only our imagination. Opportunity not in the fiscal sense, computers were unknown to the mass population and we lacked culturally even the least business sense, opportunity from our creativity and imgation point of view. My learning process was reverse engineering which led me on a decade of assembly programming as well.

The Commodore 64 adoption in Hungary flourished into a vibrant scene of computer obsessed teenagers turning our passion into a healthy competition via intros and demos. My teenage years besides assembly taught me a unique way of reverse engineering and the value of healthy competition. Even though my teenage decade was intense in technology that’s not the most important part that I carried with myself.

It was the mindset, the mentality.

Aim to be the best

My first job was at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, cognitive psychophysiological department as a Solaris operator in 1996 which was quickly followed by seven years starting in ‘97 spent at two separate Internet Service Providers. My time at the ISPs was a major milestone for multiple reasons. One, internet was still massively underdeveloped even at the infrastructure level and the ISPs were acting like high tech startups. This meant that even though we had official titles, everyone was working on everything. Even though I was only 19 years old at the time, I already had a decade of highly competitive programmer experience under my belt and the natural drive to learn everything. These early ISPs were bootcamps, extremely high intensity tech hubs where I had a chance to lay the foundations of everything that I’ve used since then.

These were the times when the data centers were just dedicated rooms with appropriate cooling. Later on major telco companies also joined the competition and they had more experience in large scape professional logistics of networking devices, computers, but in the early years all this was an improvization driven by curiosity. UNIX/Linux servers (mail, web, proxy, LDAP, etc.), networking design and configuration (IGP/BGP, access routers, switches, core routers, etc.), data center design, databases (Oracle, Postgres, MySQL, etc.) and all that comes with being in the wild wild west of the nascent internet: data center migrations, fighting off spammers and DOS attacks, hackers all with passion yet uncertain improvization.

My years at these ISPs were formative and crucial, these solid foundations allows me since then to understand any intricate systems from top to bottom. This skill in itself is extremely helpful in architecting, designing or even troublshooting almost anything in computer science.

Since I brought my healthy competition with me from my teenage years, my goal was to become the best engineer in the world, so I started my journey of traveling the world while looking for bigger and scarier challenges in my profession. In my 20s and early 30s I had a chance to experience work in the UK, US, EU and China and working for companies like JP Morgan Chase, GE Healthcare, Bloomberg, GE Corporate.

This section of my life was about acquiring as much technical experience in professional settings as humanly possible. By the age of around 35 I realized that even though I amassed a gigantic amount of knowledge and experience, my work’s influence had a limitation which I wasn’t happy about. I realized that in order to further progress professionally and as a human, I’ll have to expand my horizon and not just build technical things, but I wanted to build complete businesses.

As you can tell, I can’t settle for anything safe and boring, I always strive for challenge and growth, progress. Deciding to build businesses definitely felt like the most useful way of failing moving forward.

The entrepreneur spirit

In 2015 I realized that even though I became a world class engineer, it isn’t as challenging as I’d like it to be anymore. Probably also played a role that time passed and I matured as a human, so the spectrum of my curiosity naturally widened. To re-ignite my initial drive for growth and progress, I decided to use my technical background as a foundation I’ll try to build a business. I knew nothing about businesses, until this point all I cared about was technology. I didn’t know at the time that this will open a new chapter in my life, an iterative cycle of working with clients and using that money to try building my ideas, on repeat. All my startup attempts have failed to this day, and each and every failure taught me something highly valuable. Despite my failures with startups, I love the challenge and I see progress.

Melanomore

In 2015 after leaving GE Corporate I founded my first startup, Melanomore with a few friends of mine. The idea was remote healthcare, a service for remote skin cancer (Melanoma) screening through your phone. The plan was to start the business with real doctors using technology just to support the logistics, but then as we move ahead and gather relevant data, we’d use AI to support classification as well. We’d built the product, we’d recruiter doctors willing to work remotely through the app with clients yet we’d received our first major lesson in business: how we get to our customers?

For some reason, we completely skipped the single most important part of a business, the customer. Only after we had our product built we realized that without significantly more money we can’t reach out potential customers. This was my first major lesson in business, acquiring customers is something I think about from day one now whenever I start a new venture.

Even though I failed to make Melanomore a successful business, I’ve learned more in that single year than I’ve learned in the previous 5 years working for a company. It reminded me of my ISP years and I loved the thrill of intellectual challenge. I decided that from now on my journey has to include trying to build businesses as well, I saw the opportunity in this effort for growth as a professional, as a human.

I made it a pattern to work with a client, and then the money I earned with that client I invest into an idea of mine trying to build it into a business.

MySieve

In 2018 I tried to build a news personalizer startup which failed at the product development stage. This gave me a chance to dwell into AI, more particularly to NLP. I found NLP especially interesting among the AI categories as I’ve always been obsessed with the significance, versatility and flexibility of language in humanity.

Cheatest

In 2021 I decided to build a product which will index the internet by people and companies. My goal was to offer a service where people can search other people or companies on the internet. I envisioned this as a next generation search engine since the classic search enginers are operating on text with a pagerank algorithm at its core, but the internet with the progress of increased bandwidth has moved towards more audio/video media than texts, so I see an opportunity for improvement. My idea was to scrape the internet for images, videos, sound, processing them via AI (face recognition, pattern recognition) and index them.

At the design phase I realized that even though I believe this is a useful service, its scope is overwhelming, so I had to pick one subset, one specific area that has the best chance of turning into a business, and from there I can expand on the remaining areas as well.

After careful considerations, I decided to chase the area of dating sites. I believed that morally this is something I can stand behind and fight for, I decided to build a service which allows anyone to check if someone is on a dating site. Obviously the primary use case would be for people in relationships getting notified when their significant other has the intent to cheat. Hence, I called the product cheatest, as a test for cheaters. I found it unfair that today’s internet is offering hundreds of apps for people to cheat, but not a single app/service is out there to trying to protect the other side, those who they cheat on.

I learned everything there is to know about face recognition and built the product, using three separate face recognition algorithms (Insightface/Retinaface by the Trinity College of London, Facenet 512 by Google, Dlib by Davis King) so I can compare their performance to each other. The architecture was a hybrid architecture as I had my cost intense part (GPU stacked massive servers) running off-site while the real-time part running in AWS, connected 24/7 via VPN. Responsible cost decisions are always part of my approach.

It took me about two years to built Cheatest, faced tons of challenges I’ve never faced before. This was my first start up where I knew I have to have a powerful legal foundation to everything I do, as scraping the internet and face recognition are both legally hot topics. The prototype worked, the scraping the face recognition worked, the service was ready to be advertised. Unfortunately, I only found out at the end that none of the major tech companies are happy to host/work with Cheatest.

First, Apple rejected my app, and after a long discussion they made it clear Cheatest will never go live on their platform. I built the web version, just to find out both Facebook and Google rejects my ads and Stripe to suspend my account. These companies rejected Cheatest because the automated systems marked as a dating service, based on the description. It wasn’t a dating app, but at this point I was exhausted emotionally and financially to keep fighting the battle.

Space, robotics, biology, cyber security, AI

In 2024 I joined a Space Engineering and Technology education program, a childhood dream of mine being an avid science fiction and all time Star Trek fan. I focus on technologies around deep space exploration, science missions, robotics, satellites, all with a heightened focus on cyber security.

You can find my resume here, more details about my professional life or related external posts about my profession.