214 Square (Registration open) opened on 21/4 2018. It is a project which I had in my head for a longer time. It took a while to get a team to work with due to a no-budget.

Like others I usually have the problem that my taste in fashion is not the best (sometimes terrible). I needed help from my friends, but not everybody could help immediately when I go out shopping and tell me if this suits me well. I would need a solution on my own. So the first step was to figure out what I want, how it should work. And who would use it? From creating first sketches and mockups, businessplan and surveys to learn more about the potential customers I did everything.

The final product should be an app for iOS. I recruited a good guy. The only problem was that he was moving from India to Canada, then back for short time until he got a new job in Toronto and so on. Time passed by. So I had to act. And it was the one episode from Masters of Scale by Reid Hoffman where he interviewed Mark Zuckerberg which made me do the next step: if you are not embarassed by your first product, you released it too late. Got it. Did the work for the web-app, same stack as usual and realized it. I still have to work on it, but I am happy that it works and we soon can have the iOS app when the back-end is connected.

Fun-Fact 1: Through 214 Square did I get the admission to attend to study a semester at Draper University in Silicon Valley. Unfortunately weren't I able to attend then.

Fun-Fact 2: I created a little piece of software that played a cannon shot sound every time we got a new user. Sounds familiar? Mosaic/Netscape did so

Quokka (Request a link please) has been my answer to Facebook missing to be a network for my friends. When I used Facebook more and more I saw that I didn't see many of my friends' posts. But Facebook was for my friends.

So the mission was to go back to where Facebook started in a dorm-room in Harvard. It should be a network for my friends again. I have been looking for the initial features of Facebook and the tech-stack. I was happy to see that Mark Zuckerberg started with PHP and MySQL. The name by the way refers to the Quokka, a marsupil from Australia, often called the happiest animal on the world due to his perpetual smile. It was the intention to create something where we can be happy again, share oure thoughts without shouting and being angry because of politics.

Zuck realized Facebook's initial version in more than one and a half month. I wanted to do it faster, mostly worked at night and on the weekends. This was relatively easy and an opportunity to apply some new approaches like how I handle to edit the profile. Or, and this was important to me, how to realize translations.

I translated Quokka into German from English, Turkish and Russian. For the latter two I used a translator as my Turkish is just good enough to order a tea and in Russian I only taught myself the Cyrillic alphabet when I was a freshman in high school.

A more painful experience was the usage of a cropping- and reposition-tool for image uploads. This used jQuery of course and my relationship with this scripting language is still complicated. But it worked and I made it possible that people were able to upload, re-position, rotate and crop an uploaded image.

Skilling (Link - use Invitation-Code Lambda_172812) has been my November-project. I began at the beginning of November and almost completed everything within the same month though I worked most on weekends and in the night till 12am.

On my last day on college I have been working on an algorithm to make applying and recruiting easier. Honeycomb - the algorithm's name - used to show mumeric skill ratings instead of descriptions such as "Master skills in C#". You can have a rating of 78 instead of "Master skills" which says more if a recruiter is searching devs with a value of 75 or higher.

Problem and solution: The problem to solve is that not every applicant can present himself well or very well, though he would be the ideal candidate. And recruiters can work faster if they see ratings rather than a self-description. The solution is my algorithm which is asking users for ratings of their contacts. Of course the algorithm is doing more, but it's my personal asset.

Target Audience and Design: The audience is clear, applicants and recruiters. Applicants want to save time finding and applying to jobs by only finding jobs they are really qualified for. Recruiters want the same, but not for jobs, but for candidates. In the newsfeed I integrated rating panels and skill panels. Rating panels let you rate a skill which you previously have assigned to a contact. What you see later is only a rating after values have been crunched by an algorithm. Recruiters have their own page, can see how many users are qualified and can declare own variables to find candidates.

Experimental: What I've included was a new design approach for the newsfeed. On Facebook and LinkedIn the newsfeed is surrounded by many distracting objects and the navbar with notifications. The menu can now be opened when clicking (and typing) something into the search-bar while panels and notifcations are integrated into the newsfeed and will be shown between the posts. This way I prevent distractions from the content.

This is my most-recent project. I wanted to create an own mailer similar to MailChimp as I got some inspiration due to a conversation with a friend who previously worked at a German cruising company and he told me more about the opening rates.

The tool allows you to create a campaign and issues within a campaign. You write your own texts within an editor and then can send the mail to your subscribers. With a tracking pixel inside you can see how many receivers have opened the mail and you can compare to average opening-rates.

What I'd like to add is that you can create multiple articles with multiple co-workers and you add and sort the articles before you send the mail. I also want to add image-insertions to the content.

Lingvo (Link - is my own version of Duolingo which I enjoyed while learning Italian (and later some Turkish and more). Here I wanted to work a bit with jQuery.

This tool will let you learn the alev bet, the Hebraic alphabet or Cyrillic. If you are good you only see ten questions as you need ten right answers to succeed.

For Lingvo I didn't use any database or else. All letters were saved in arrays. But I still have to implement a way that the user will re-try on letters which haven't been recognized correctly.

For a startup-project I wanted a tool for a better communication with the shareholders, for polls and document sharing.

IR let me create stock classes and transfer shares to shareholders. Shareholders then can vote on topics such as dividend heights and votes will respect how many votes somebody has due to different stock classes.

Every user - you can not simply join, the admin has to create a profile - can also receive emails with a summary of all public posts from the page.

An energy solicitor asked me to create a piece of software where he could insert customer and contract data and get notified weeks before a contract is running out.

This tool will let you learn the alev bet, the Hebraic alphabet or Cyrillic. If you are good you only see ten questions as you need ten right answers to succeed.

For Lingvo I didn't use any database or else. All letters were saved in arrays. But I still have to implement a way that the user will re-try on letters which haven't been recognized correctly.

Vinidra (later renamed Orbity) is what I did with Skilling. Before expanding the team we had two versions made with HTML, PHP and MySQL. The platform was not only a network, but offered an intranet with to-do-lists, documents and more for companies. So we wanted to keep people on our page.

After two versions (the latter one has been used by a course of my university) we began to break up things and reassembled a team. The challenge was to get things done with people who had a job and needed recreational time or worked on their PhD-thesis. Eventually we stopped.

I wouldn't call it a failure as we got it done. But the quality didn't make me happy..

The Franklin Journal was the idea of citizen's journalism and the exchange of views from opposing point of views, such as Democrats and Republicans. Instead of reading "neutral" articles FJ's purpose was to show Republicans the view from a Democrat's point and upside down.

Good was the point that, though not investing anything into marketing, we have reached around 3000 unique users in a single month during Gezi-protests in Turkey. But it was bad that it was mostly me who has written the articles as - to expect - most visitors didn't want to spend time on writing.

FJ died in the same year it appeared. But later I have been working on front-end- improvements (which you can see on the right side of each screenshot).

That was fun. Red Moose was the idea to turn sports into a stock-trading game. Then soccer, now baseball I see trends in sports and think that instead of betting people should be able to trade team shares.

Every league was an index, the index price can be derived from every stock in the index. And trading worked similar to real exchanges, comparing bids and asks, prices and quantity. We also had A- and B-shares.

It was my first project and a good lesson about usability, UI and technology. Then my developer didn't like Javascript and we used cronjobs instead. But our host didn't like this.

The most interesting chapter was that we got some attention for Red Moose as we have been in touch with Germany's Zynga-rival and for a short time with Yahoo's board of directors due to the company's fantasy sports products.