Probably the biggest project I took on in my technical career was building an app called Kiwi during my early years at Hive AI. It was one of those textbook examples of working late into the night, finding your flow state as you became an expert at using the tools you needed, and building out a product in record time.

From there, I believe the biggest non-technical project during my time at Hive was building out the whole product called Outlet, a discount marketplace product. Organizing the team of 10 engineers, designers, and managers was a new kind of challenge that taught me a lot about how to create and lead effective teams.

MIX, my augmented reality public art and creative experiences app is the first full project that I did completely on my own. Inspired solely by my desire to see a future that doesn’t exist yet, I didn’t want to sit around wait for someone else to try it. I developed the full frontend and backend, and have since been working to see if I can turn this project into a full-time startup through various programs at MIT.

For the last 3 years I’ve been fascinated with the idea of writing notes, recording knowledge, and potentially using linked notes to synthesize new information and new findings. This is why I built a fully customized publishing pipeline for my personal notes that I write in logseq. It’s been a side project that I have worked for multiple years now, and I have made it so my notes get automatically processed as I save them, and anything I mark as public gets uploaded and published on my website: denizaydemir.com. I want to continue building this system to build semantic connections, and potentially create an underlying category theory structure that could be used as a knowledge graph.

I’m also working on other projects that I expect to be quite proud of, including two theses for my two programs at MIT (one on epistemology, decision making, and category theory, and the other on how serendipity and placemaking are important for well-being in cities). I also have been making music as an amateur for years with a friend, and hope to have a release for the at project this year.