About


About Bruno Fernandez-Ruiz.

I am a café dude, a technology entrepreneur and a wanna-be triathlete age grouper. I am obsessed by technical prowess and creating new business opportunities driven by technology. I highly enjoy coding, and the mental state it drives. In fact, I don’t think it’s possible to remain a technologist without coding on a regular basis.

I am currently running Nexar together with my co-founder, Eran Shir, making driving on the roads safer, today. We are applying computer vision, machine learning, deep learning, and generally Artificial Intelligence, to make safer driving accessible to the 1.2 billion vehicles out there, regardless of make, model, or age.

Previously, I used to work at Yahoo as a Senior Fellow, focusing in computational advertising, search and recommender systems.

I started off programming with a Sinclair Spectrum 48 (ZX80/ZX81) that my dad had bought me for Christmas of 1982. The Spectrum was quite a novelty at the time, with many programs, mainly games, being developed at the time for it. But honestly it quickly became quite boring. After the power up cycle, you would get a $ prompt where to type load and start the tape machine. Loading a program from tape would take anything between 3 to 5 minutes. Most frequently the load would fail almost at the end of the tape, back to a power up cycle …

So I got tired of playing the load-the-tape-to-reboot game in the Spectrum 48 and, like many children in my generation, I decided to explore programming. Although the Spectrum had a built-in BASIC interpreter, it was the assembler instruction set for the ZX80/ZX81 processor what seemed like real dark magic and fun! I remember spending weekends copying (verbatum!) endless pages of hex code from magazines. Ah, fun days! The ZX81 assembler had opened what at the time I thought were endless opportunities. With some ZX80 assembly exploration, I discovered a 16-colour palette and 8-bit sound modulation. All in a grand 1024 bytes of RAM.

Sine these early Sinclair days, I have been literally hooked into software development and programming languages. In chronological order, I moved my way through BASIC, C, 8088 assembler, Lisp, Pascal, Fortran, C++, Smalltalk, Java, Ruby, Scala, Clojure and JavaScript. Most recently I have been exploring and learning Go and Swift.

I am extremely grateful to my parents for opening the doors to what at the time started as a hobby and ended up becoming my professional career.

The opinions expressed here are my own personal perspectives and do not necessarily reflect or represent my employer’s view.

You can follow me on twitter as @olympum