Geist in the Seidt

I am Stephan Seidt, a business owner and freelance IT consultant with 20 years of experience in Software Engineering and other stuff.

Find me on Bluesky, LinkedIn, Instagram or reach out via email.

Stuff

Here’s what I do:

Do ask for references. Know that I love puns and automation. I was diagnosed with ADHD in my 30s and lol, that explained a lot.

/now

horama

We’ve developed a service for e-commerce businesses that extracts highly-accurate structured master data from product images and clusters products for high-conversion product-matching and cross-selling. The accuracy and reliability of our systems are constantly evaluated and compared. We combine state-of-the-art multi-modal LLMs and embeddings, intelligent vector search, automatic self-evaluations, continuously evolving proprietary datasets and tasking pipelines. We generate really good data.

As for the pun, “Hórama” is ancient Greek for "that which is seen".

seidt.business

I passionately melt for 3d printing, automation and generative AI. Seidt Business is our nightgown-to-become-mantle parametric shell company of all these efforts.

Procedurally generated aesthetic 3d printed designer lamps or vases? Parametric Baroque gilded picture frames? Comfy gyroid TPU pillows? Genau!

/past

Born in 1988 in Munich, Germany.

As teenagers, my friends and I hosted 3-day LAN parties at our homes. Instead of playing games, I often spent 1–2 days reconfiguring and (statically) recompiling my NetBSD kernel to successfully emulate enough of Linux and WINE to play Counter-Strike. Sounds weird, but I genuinely did this for the enjoyment of the challenge. I would traditionally dual-boot into Windows XP on the last day to dominate Q3DM17 with my Railgun.

My first tech job was freelancing with 9elements to build a social network in 2008 that still exists. Another interesting project was building the VDSL availability check for Telekom (dm #e20074 to start a self-hex group). With geospatial KML data and some screens I made an "enter your address to check availability" web app with GMaps geocoding and polygon overlays, backed by a geospatially indexed Postgres+PostGIS database. It was fast and reliable, operated for years and appeared in a slide deck at my wife's college once, which was just funny. I was but a baby and this time was special for me, and I will be forever grateful for the professional experience, opportunities and priceless life advice I’ve received from my friends there. I am now a significantly larger baby.

In 2010 I joined Uxebu to become an early JavaScript hipster. We built ludicrous web apps with Dojo for clients and dreamed of SSJS before Ryan showed everyone how it’s node done. I’ve also written an ActionScript 3 bytecode de-compiler in JavaScript and set up custom CI tooling that our team used to spot performance regressions of our vector animation library.

In 2012 I moved to Berlin and joined Contentful as its very first employee. I am extremely proud of what we have achieved back then: We architected, developed, launched and operated the core of what today is a successful, multi-billion-euro software company. I have shipped the two core content APIs, reintegrated estranged node, rails and erlang services after API naming bike shedding sessions, wrote code to juggle data between S3 (my content is safe), ElasticSearch (where the heck is my content), Redis (fuck it, let's all edit content together at the same time) and several in-memory caches, shipped the entire initial interactive documentation, hired people, implemented and operated all levels of support, got paged at night while visiting the family for Christmas, developed an unhealthy relationship with Florida Eiscreme. Simply: Whatever it took. Not all great, but I did gain an incredible amount of experience.

I went freelance again in 2015 and had the great pleasure of working for many years with IDEO. Ever experienced the relaunch a design-focused consultancy's internet presence? Yeah. I’ve worked with many fantastic people there over the years and was, among assisting with many client projects, entrusted with the technological architecture and 24/7 operation of the then new IDEO.com, and later replacing their entire CRM pipeline.

From 2020-2023 I worked for my friend's company Copper. Copper is largely a serverless stack, so I’ve spent a lot of time improving their infrastructure: migrating resources into separate AWS accounts, building integrated internal tools for testing (virtual POS system), creating a data analytics platform on top of DynamoDB, both for backends serving user-facing UIs and business operations dashboards. I’ve successfully discovered structural weak spots and came up with solutions that saved people and the company a lot of attention, time and money.

In 2022, a business partner and I created an entire last-mile logistics platform from scratch for the Berlin startup LABELS: An incredibly intricate Shopify app (IKYKY), a public API, a fast web app for admin and logistics, a reliable app for riders and wonderful order tracking for customers. This all runs on cheap, automatically provisioned, reliable and GDPR-compliant infrastructure. I am proud of the process design and engineering work we have done, and how it enabled the company.

Jump to now.