Denis Mită

Stella grew out of the team behind Try it on AI. The product was an AI-native digital marketing platform — combining social media management, collaborative workflows, and LLM-powered content tools customized to each client's brand voice and strategy.

As a full-stack engineer, I owned the setup of the platform's top-level pages and core sections. I integrated billing via Stripe and built several custom widgets from scratch, including a calendar scheduling tool.

The most impactful feature I shipped was a unified social media publishing interface. It allowed users to compose a single post and distribute it across multiple channels, with large language models automatically adapting the tone, format, and length for each platform's audience — an early and practical application of LLMs in a production workflow that I found genuinely exciting to build.

At Try it On AI, I stepped into a full-stack generalist role, taking ownership of both frontend features and backend integrations across the platform.

The core product used generative AI to produce studio-quality headshots from everyday photos. I built image editing tools, standardized client-side image resizing via the HTML Canvas element, and integrated external image processing and editing APIs to give users advanced editing capabilities — all powered by AI models running inference on the backend.

On the business side, I helped pivot the product toward B2B solutions: a corporate team feature for professional headshots, a commissioning program for photographers, and product linking to photos so users could "buy the look" they admired.

One of the more challenging features I developed was a public API dashboard that exposed the platform's AI-powered capabilities to external clients, enabling them to integrate headshot generation and image editing directly into their own products.

I joined Deepwaters as their primary front-end engineer and built the majority of their off-chain trading platform from scratch, alongside maintaining the company's marketing website.

This was the ideal environment for my strengths — precise product specs and the freedom to architect an entire web application from the ground up. I could invest in code architecture, component design, and overall quality rather than patching features onto an evolved legacy codebase.

Some of my favorite work here included the pie chart and price evolution chart — to me, charts sit at the intersection of data and geometry, making them some of the most complex and rewarding widgets to build. Both were implemented using only SVGs and primitive HTML elements, with no charting library involved.

Another highlight was the smart amount input: it auto-formats numbers in real time and prevents invalid states entirely. The core logic intercepts the "input" event after the user's action but before the UI updates, allowing seamless reformatting with zero flicker.

I also delivered the full responsive adaptation for mobile, reworking layouts, typography scales, and spacing across the platform.

At Minerva Gate, I led the delivery of multiple client-facing projects across different industries, alongside internal tools like the recruitment section of our website.

My role went well beyond code. I wore many hats: project manager, workflow designer, junior developer coach, and client liaison. In a small team, every skill gets used — and that breadth gave me a much sharper understanding of how startups operate end to end.

I learned how to plan efficiently at a small scale, how to research and adopt tools outside my core scope to improve the team's output, and how to keep multiple concurrent projects moving forward with limited resources.

As a stakeholder, my decisions carried real weight. It taught me that leading a startup demands more than hard work — it requires sharp judgment, the right insights at the right time, and the willingness to change direction when the evidence points that way.

Blink was born from the CS Academy team when our CTO drafted what would become the Blink Protocol — a distributed ledger. In the first phase, we implemented the protocol itself and built the web applications around it.

The product evolved into a unified identity and payments solution for the web. Think Apple Pay, but purpose-built for microtransactions, subscriptions, donations, e-commerce, and email newsletters. Users managed all their web payments from a single dashboard; publishers got a streamlined way to monetize content.

As the founding front-end engineer, I built the landing pages, mobile wallet, user dashboard, publisher dashboard, admin dashboard, and the most technically demanding pieces: the Blink SDK and the iframe application.

The iframe app was by far the hardest challenge — nothing like it existed at the time. I had to navigate cross-browser inconsistencies in how iframes handle clicks, taps, and resizes, and architect a system from scratch.

The SDK, injected into a publisher's website, managed the lifecycle of all iframes on the page (paywalls, banners) while rendering popups in an invisible overlay iframe that covered the viewport without blocking user interactions.

The hardest part was unifying different iframe application types under a single architecture, sharing components between the user dashboard and the embedded apps, and maintaining multiple SDK versions and configurations for different clients simultaneously.

The single most painful feature was cross-iframe authentication. OAuth from inside an iframe is hard enough — browsers limit cross-window communication, APIs change, and popup blockers interfere. Add to that users logging in from the Facebook Messenger in-app browser (single-tab only, redirect-based auth required), and it took real ingenuity to make authentication feel seamless on every browser and device.

Some of the most innovative features lived in the publisher dashboard:

User Journeys — a visual builder that let publishers define conditional logic for user interactions, run A/B tests on each journey variant, and track custom metrics.

Custom Panels — publishers could go beyond styling. They could write custom HTML and CSS, access embedded components and journey variables, and create fully dynamic, brand-specific experiences.

Blink was the most complex product I've worked on, and I'm proud to have architected most of its front-end from day one. You can see it in action on publications like The New Republic and It's a Southern Thing.

Two internships at Google, both during university breaks. The first on the Google Cloud team in Warsaw, Poland; the second on Google Flights in Zurich, Switzerland. Both were front-end focused.

At Google Cloud, I built a standalone Chrome extension for the team — a developer tool for stats monitoring, quick actions, and web inspection. I also contributed a feature to the Kubernetes front-end using Angular.

At Google Flights, I implemented the price evolution chart for tracked flights. While I used Google Charts as the base, matching the design prototypes required creative workarounds — notably using CSS pseudo-elements to render custom tooltip tails that the charting API didn't natively support.

The biggest takeaway from Google was seeing how strong processes enable code to scale. Individual output feels smaller than at a startup, but the system ensures steady, reliable progress. I also learned that at scale, edge cases multiply — at Google Flights, many UI bugs stemmed from right-to-left language support alone.

Building and maintaining products at that scale is a discipline in itself, and team experience is the strongest predictor of success.

I joined CS Academy straight out of high school with zero professional experience. We were a team of competitive programmers who loved algorithmic contests, and we built our own platform from scratch. It's still actively used today for contests, including Romania's national selection camps for international olympiads.

I prepared algorithmic tasks for the platform and built interactive widgets for several of them. The platform later partnered with IEEE to host their annual college-level 24-hour contests, and I served on the contest committee in 2017 and 2021.

Alongside the CTO, I contributed to Stem JS — a custom JSX front-end framework — where I built and styled foundational components: radio groups, tab areas, and a collapsible section divider.

A few standout front-end pieces I built here:

The workspace — a multi-language in-browser code editor built on Ace, wired to a backend for compilation and execution. I parsed build output to display inline errors and warnings directly in the editor.

The graph editor — an interactive visualizer where users can describe a graph via input or draw it manually. We started with D3, then rewrote it from scratch for full control. An essential tool for competitive programmers.

The diff tool — I implemented an O(N*D) diffing algorithm to find string differences, computed the relevant text blocks, highlighted them, and rendered gutter connections using SVG curves.