Denes Kovacs
Senior Project Manager at EPAM Systems, Zurich
Zurich, Switzerland
Denes has spent his career on the delivery side of software, starting as a business analyst on telecom billing and CRM programmes at Wipro in Budapest, where he and Mate worked together, and now running agile delivery out of Zurich for EPAM Systems. His work has covered life sciences, IoT for medical diagnostics, a Swiss digital marketplace, and data and trading systems in commodities. He finished an MBA in sustainability, then spent three months building Frontier, an application that walks a small company through the EU's sustainability report. He wrote about seventy thousand lines of it by prompting.
What he built
Frontier takes EFRAG’s official questionnaire, the Excel sheet a small company is handed when a bank or a customer asks for its sustainability report, and turns it into a series of ordinary conversations. One topic at a time, in the order the standard wants them, in whichever language the company works in. It runs on the machine in front of you.
He wrote it over three months by prompting, and it is not his first attempt at a product. Away from the desk it is astrophotography and Formula One, both recent, both taken up the same way.
I just love that we are living in the future. Anything that I can do with a computer is interesting for me.
What did Denes build? - Delivery and programme management. Agile delivery for a Swiss life-science company, a legacy platform moved to cloud, IoT product development in medical diagnostics, and a Swiss digital marketplace. Earlier, end-to-end programme management and P&L across a large beverage business.
- Business analysis, from the telecom years. Billing and CRM transformation, process re-engineering, solution design and user acceptance testing, on wireline and wireless programmes in Budapest. The habit of asking what a system is actually for is the oldest thing he brought to the show.
- EU sustainability reporting. The CSRD, the VSME standard and EFRAG's official questionnaire, which is the Excel sheet a small company gets handed. He knows the report well enough to answer it from memory, and tracks the legislation as it moves.
- Startup ideas, as a habit. Frontier is not the first. He has run a mobile app consultancy on the side, been product owner on a self-funded game to learn prototyping end to end, and interviewed founders as part of the MBA. Building the thing is the part he has always done; the market is the part he came to the show for.
- Building software by prompting. Frontier is about seventy thousand lines written over three months, front and back, committed to GitHub as he went. He has run Claude's own code review over it, and tested the same job against OpenAI, Mistral and a local model.
Episodes
What they said afterwards
Mate is a great host who makes you feel comfortable from the start. I was genuinely surprised by how focused and engaged he was throughout our session. What really stands out is his rare mix of solid technical and business skills — he understands the tech, but also thinks about real client needs, finding customers and what actually works in the market. Really enjoyed the conversation!
Prompty