Deniel Mirzoian

Junior Deniel Mirzoian, who grew up in Russia and moved to the United States at ten years old, has always been the entrepreneurial type. At 12, Mirzoian started to teach himself to code, far ahead of most kids his age.

“Up until the age of 12, I was a quite dedicated Minecraft gamer. I played pretty consistently, until I realized that I suck at it,” Mirzoian said. “That’s when I transitioned into learning gradually more and more about code through trial and error, and eventually learning my first programming language, which was PHP.”

Mirzoian’s first programs added modifications to Minecraft, leading him to continue coding. Since then, Mirzoian has improved quite a bit and decided to co-found a Minecraft server. 

“I partnered with a guy who had a lot of connections with other people [in the Minecraft community], so we united our powers with me doing the technical end,” Mirzoian said. “It’s a very long process [to create a server], and it’s really not easy when you’re starting off. You need experience and connections with others in order to actually be able to publish things properly.”

Since then, Mirzoian has gone on to create complex open-source applications such as JasonDB. JasonDB is a program that allows users to communicate to a database in a more user-friendly way.

“I made some libraries for other developers to use like Jason dB, which is basically a wrapper around a Mongo database,” Mirzoian said. “[It’s] a more convenient way and other different libraries for people to use those were some of my public projects.”

In Principles of Computer Science during his freshman year, Mirzoian’s final project allowed him to create Snap — a block coding language — projects with his own new programming language.

“My favorite project was Anti Snap Script. I was really proud of that one,” said Mirzoian. “In normal computer science, I was already quite experienced, and they were forcing people to use block code,” Mirzoian said. “For the final project, we had the option of whatever we wanted to make, and I was really tired of [Snap], so I decided to make my own transpiler programming language, which was called Anti Snap Script.”

Over the summer, Mirzoian took on many new projects, including working on a Minecraft server in partnership with Mojang, the company behind Minecraft and a subsidiary of Microsoft. Mirzoian is also interested in applying his programming and development skills to new fields in the future.

“I want to learn more about other fields, including web development and app development because I see a lot of potential in that space,” Mirzoian said. “Also VR development, because that space is also growing a lot of the metaverse and all those other trends popping up. And there’s just a lot of potential new use cases and they seem very fascinating to me, and I want to learn more about them.”