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.

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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?

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Recently unknown attackers have accessed 29 million Facebook users’ data. (You can check if you were affected on this page.) The event raised a lot of questions in people’s heads: should I change my password? Could I have been affected if I used two-factor authentication? What kind of data could attackers steal? Could they have accessed Facebook-connected apps like Messenger or Tinder?

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Computer Science covers a very large number of areas, and it's hard to know where to get started. Below is a collection of topics, descriptions, practice problems, and some recommendations on how to get started. I included the most exciting/enticing tutorials and websites that I know about.

Computer Science Topics for Explorers

The document is open for comments and suggestions: if you have questions or ideas, please include them in the document for the benefit of other readers.

Happy exploration!

A rengeteg Bitcoinról szóló újsághírnek bizony 90%-a butaság, de a másik 10% valóban értékes és fontos. De melyik az a 10%?

Az OTP konferenciáján (technikai tudás igénye nélkül) bemutattam, hogy mi az a Bitcoin, mi a története, és hogy tényleg értékes-e, mint fizetőeszköz.

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.

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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.

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