"This work, it’s fulfilling" - Forbes Portrait

In 2019, I was honoured by the outstanding journalist Zsuzsanna Dömös writing a portrait of me for Forbes Hungary. Many of my international friends asked for a translation - so, here it is. Thank you to Réka Turcsányi for the translation.

This work, it’s fulfilling

Written by: Zsuzsanna Dömös. Photo by: László Sebestyén.

Miklós Danka is not even thirty, yet he has been working for one of the most exciting Silicon Valley companies, Palantir Technologies, for seven years. Spies, the army, government bodies, and the aerospace, pharmaceutical, and energy industries are among his business partners, while he also teaches on a regular basis, at home and abroad. He has taken part in Hungarian politics too.


Programming for Psychologists? Isn’t This the Philosophical Faculty?

The following is the English original of an article that has been published in Czech in the magazine of Psychology students at the Charles University in Prague (see the Czech version at the end of this post).

Photo by Vít Krištof

In September of 2009, I started my Computer Science studies at Cambridge in the UK. During one of our first courses I was astonished to learn that a majority of these smart, experienced, and well-selected students struggled grasping certain programming concepts. Recursion (some program code executing itself) stood out in particular as something that was crippling to others but felt natural to me. How could this be? I concluded that either I was an alien with a special brain (unlikely), or I had some prior experience that caused this difference (more likely). But what could it have been?

Tech Camp - Second Session

You can read this post in the original Hungarian here: http://agondolkodasorome.hu/2016/11/20/techtabor-2/

Mid-November brought around the second session of the Tech Camp. (You can read about the goals of the program in this post about the first session.)

This was an intense, 8.5-hour-long session, with only about 90 minutes low time in between activities. Based on the experiences of the first session we made a few changes, which resulted in some significant improvements: both kids and mentors had overwhelmingly positive feedback, reflected by the buzzing, enthusiastic atmosphere.

The venue was particularly pleasant: Logiscool didn’t only provide a room, but welcomed us with pizza, cookies, beverages, and the kind company of their colleagues.

Tech Camp Beta - The First Session

You can read this post in the original Hungarian here: http://agondolkodasorome.hu/2016/10/25/techtabor-beta-az-elso-alkalom/

Mid-October 2016 brought around the first session of Tech Camp, our new, experimental educational program.

Goals

It is well known that programming and technology has an ever increasing role in today’s world - and that most school systems, including the Hungarian one, don’t keep up with this trend. In Hungary, there are rare occurrences of extra-curricular programming classes, but these tend to be either basic introductions to kids, or algorithmic and competition-oriented education for talented students.

While these are indeed valuable, it is frequently equally or more important to understand what is worth building, and how to implement it. These require numerous software engineering, product design, project management, and even entrepreneurial principles. However, the education of said principles (even outside the school system) is virtually non-existent. This is what our experiment tries to salvage.