ÇSCagatay SagirSoftware + web developer

Computer science seniorAshburn, Virginia

Projects thatturn ideasinto momentum.

Hi, my name is Cagatay. I'm a computer science student and product-minded developer who builds practical, thoughtful web and CMS solutions for mission-driven teams in the U.S. and Türkiye.

Start with the work Résumé

Open to software engineering, full-stack and systems internships or part-time roles

Graduating 2027

Focus areas

  • Software
    Engineering
  • CMS +
    Content Systems
  • Data
    Integrations
  • Performance
    & UX

00 / What I bring

Think

I can find the useful problem inside the noisy one.

Requirements, user flow, tradeoffs, and the next best decision.

Build

I can turn the decision into something real.

Interfaces, systems, integrations, testing, deployment, and the unglamorous details.

Communicate

I can make the work easy for a team to pick up.

Progress a stakeholder can follow, decisions written down, and a handoff that respects the next person.

01 / Work experience

Some of what I built during my most recent internship.

Summer 2026, I joined the two-person digital team at The Salvation Army's National Headquarters and worked across a range of projects. The biggest was a custom multi-site CMS, built so staff could publish their own sites without a developer in the loop. The other four shipped alongside it, on national and program sites that take more than 10 million views a year.

Product engineering · Multi-site publishing
Multi-site CMS editor showing a page tree, live editable page and reusable section library
CASE 01

Product engineering · Multi-site publishing

A CMS built for an eleven-site migration

Eleven aging sites, three different platforms, and a two-person team that could not keep being the bottleneck for every text change. I designed and built the system that takes them off that treadmill.

Vue 3, Vite and Tailwind in the browser, Firestore for the content, and one reader per class of site, so adding the third never means copying the renderer. Every page is an ordered list of reusable sections drawn from a library of 118 templates, edited on the real page inside an iframe: click a heading and type, swap an image, pick an icon, set a link, style a button and its hover state. New pages get built by placing sections and naming a URL, and the page tree and navigation are dragged into shape there too. Editor and live site render from the same code, so what you edit is what ships. Around it: draft to review to publish, revision history, one-click rollback, scheduled releases, four permission tiers, and a domain panel that hands you the DNS records. Two sites publish from it today, behind 12 build gates and 750+ tests, and I wrote the 13-document handover the team kept.

11-sitemigration scope118section templates4permission tiers
Vue 3FirestoreViteTailwindPlaywright
See the archive
Front-end · Content design · Stakeholder review
Long-form national Salvation Army volunteer page
CASE 02

Front-end · Content design · Stakeholder review

A national volunteer journey, rebuilt

The national volunteer page had to inspire people, answer practical questions, and get them to a real local opportunity without burying the next step under a wall of buttons.

I rebuilt it as one long-form journey: why this matters, what the commitment actually looks like, then a single clear way to act. Refining the CTA hierarchy was most of the work, because the old page offered five next steps at once and buried the one that mattered. A 51-region map now carries people to a real local opportunity, and the whole page went through review for alignment, accessibility, mobile behavior and conversion.

51mapped regions10-questionFAQMulti-stakeholder review
HTMLCSSBootstrap 5JavaScriptZesty
View the live work
Full-stack · Public site + sponsor operations
The Better Together 2027 conference site: hero, speakers, sponsors, schedule and workshops
CASE 03

Full-stack · Public site + sponsor operations

A conference site, and the pipeline behind it

Better Together 2027 is the organization's national conference, four days in Kansas City. I worked on the site itself, and built the sponsor pipeline behind its Become a Sponsor button, because the event platform could not handle that workflow.

Sponsorships used to arrive as email attachments and get retyped. Now a company registers once: the tier it picks derives its booth space and attendee allotment, the team works the records in an admin dashboard, and the pipeline exports as the CSV the event system consumes. PHP and MySQL on a shared host, because that is what the team already runs.

Public conference siteTier-derived allotmentsDashboard + CSV export
PHPMySQLJavaScriptBootstrapcPanel
View the live work
Information design · CMS integration
Redesigned Human Needs Index website
CASE 04

Information design · CMS integration

Complex research, made easier to explore

The Human Needs Index turns a multidimensional research model into something a policymaker or a reporter can read at a glance. The old site made you work for it.

I rebuilt the information hierarchy so the index reads as a finding rather than a dataset, rebuilt the front end responsively, and wired all four pages to the new CMS. It was also the CMS proving ground: these are the pages I extracted into sections and published back through the pipeline, which is where the contrast failures, the missing search titles and a filter that quietly hid matching results all surfaced and got fixed.

Public site rebuildCMS integrationResponsive data story
ReactTypeScriptCSSFirebaseAccessibility
View the live work
Production web work · Zesty CMS
The Salvation Army national website home page
CASE 05

Production web work · Zesty CMS

Shipping into the live national site

While the new CMS was being built, the existing national site still had to ship. It takes more than 10 million views a year, runs on Zesty against a national Bootstrap design system, and the pages that needed work were the ones with the most traffic on them.

I edited live production pages, restructured the giving pages so attribution could finally be tracked, and built reusable content modules to the national style system, so the next editor places one instead of pasting markup. All of it went in on the live site, inside an existing design system, under review.

10M+views a yearGiving pages restructuredReusable national modules
HTMLCSSBootstrap 5JavaScriptZesty
View the live work

The summer produced more than these five.

Open the full internship archive

Employment

Here's my full work history.

  1. May – July 2026

    Alexandria, VA · Hybrid, ~25 hrs/week

    Web Communications Intern

    The Salvation Army National Headquarters, Digital / Web team

    A two-person web team runs the national digital presence. I joined it for eleven weeks and worked two tracks at once: building a custom multi-site content management system so staff could edit their own sites, and shipping real content and features to the live national website.

    • Designed and built a multi-site CMS (Vue 3, Vite, Tailwind, Firebase / Firestore) with four-tier permissions, an in-place visual editor, a review-and-publish queue and revision history. Two live sites publish from it.
    • Rebuilt the organization's national volunteer page, the pillar page that search and AI assistants land on, to the team's Figma design system and national style sheet in Bootstrap 5.
    • Built a PHP / MySQL sponsor registration platform for a national conference, with tier-derived allotments, an admin dashboard and a CSV export for the event system that had to consume it.
    • Edited live production pages on a national site that takes more than 10 million views a year, and restructured donation-giving pages with attribution tracking.
    • Wrote the 13-document handover package the team kept after I left, and left twelve build gates and 750+ automated tests behind it.
    Vue 3FirebaseJavaScriptBootstrap 5PHPMySQLPlaywrightFigma

  2. June 2022 – present

    Ashburn, VA · Remote, US & Türkiye

    Freelance Software & Web Developer

    Self-employed, Cagatay Creative Studio

    Seven production websites for clients across two countries, each one taken from the first conversation through design, build, launch and the year of small changes after it. Most of these clients had no web presence at all, which means the brief usually started with the business, not the brand.

    • Built and deployed 7+ responsive production sites across beauty services, architecture, tailoring, cross-border e-commerce, food and tutoring.
    • Translated client requirements into interfaces non-technical owners could keep running, and handled deployment and DNS on Netlify, Cloudflare Pages and Supabase.
    • Worked in two languages throughout: Turkish-language UX for the Istanbul clients, English for the US ones.
    • Managed every project end to end: requirements, visual design, implementation, testing, launch, and post-launch support, communicating directly with the owner.
    JavaScriptHTML / CSSViteSupabaseCloudflare PagesNetlify

  3. June 2022 – October 2024

    Ashburn, VA

    Commercial & Retail Sales Associate

    Fortessa Tableware Solutions

    Two and a half years on commercial accounts: Marriott, Hilton, Disney, Raventek. It is not a software job and I list it deliberately: it is where I learned to explain a technical constraint to somebody who does not want to hear about it, which turned out to be most of what an internship on a two-person web team requires.

    • Supported enterprise accounts through tailored service and relationship management, contributing to a 15% increase in client retention.
    • Coordinated large commercial orders, contributing to 20% growth in repeat orders while improving pickup, shipment and inventory workflows.

02 / Client work

Then there's everything I built alongside school.

Client work taught me to listen for what someone means, not just what they ask for, and to carry a project from a blank page through launch without losing the original point. It also meant making the calls myself, with no roadmap and nobody to escalate to.

Köy Gürmesi website
01Visit site

Village produce · Türkiye

Köy Gürmesi

A food brand whose whole promise is provenance, so the site had to answer where each thing comes from and who makes it before it asked anyone to order.

Creative directionFront-endTurkish UX
View project 01 / 06
CES Mimarlık website
02Visit site

Architecture & construction

CES Mimarlık

An Istanbul firm working across architecture, renovation and construction, with its services and its built work organized so the range reads clearly at a glance.

Brand systemResponsive UXContent structure
View project 02 / 06
Atelier Sanem website
03Visit site

Made-to-measure fashion

Atelier Sanem

An editorial site that gives a 23-year tailoring practice a digital home with the same care as the clothes.

Editorial designTurkish UXStorytelling
View project 03 / 06
BŞ Güzellik website
04Visit site

Beauty studio · Istanbul

BŞ Güzellik

A Turkish-language booking experience built to make a local service business feel trustworthy before the first appointment.

Creative directionFront-endBooking flow
View project 04 / 06
ShopUSA to Ghana website
05Visit site

Cross-border commerce

ShopUSA to Ghana

A storefront designed around the trust and logistics questions that come with shopping across markets.

E-commercePaymentsInternational shipping
View project 05 / 06
The Job Application Tracker sign-in screen
06Visit site

Personal tool · Full-stack

Job Application Tracker

The tracker I actually use, and the project where I learned what row-level security is for. Vanilla JavaScript in three layers over Supabase and Postgres (screens, a storage layer, then one API wrapper) with policies that isolate every user's data in the database instead of trusting the client to. Paste a job listing into AI Quick Add and Gemini fills the fields in.

Supabase + PostgresRow-level securityGemini API
View project 06 / 06

What I help with

  • Front-end buildResponsive, hand-written, no page builder
  • Design and layoutFrom a blank page to a launched site
  • Creative directionType, color and the story the site tells
Cagatay Creative Studio website

Want the client-facing version?

Cagatay Creative is where I present the studio work.

This portfolio is about me as a candidate. I also keep a studio site for my freelance work, which is where I talk with clients and show the projects properly. Feel free to take a look.

Visit Cagatay Creative

03 / Education

The degree is where I learn why things hold up.

Data structures, algorithms, systems and low-level programming are the parts I keep reaching for once a project stops being about screens and starts being about why something is slow, fragile or unsafe. That is the difference between a site that works and one that keeps working. The four groups below span the whole degree, some of it finished and some of it in progress.

DegreeB.S. Computer ScienceSchoolGeorge Mason UniversityExpected2027RecognitionDean's List · 2 terms
01

Programming foundations

How to model a problem, structure a program, and understand what the machine is doing.

  • CS 112 · Programming
  • CS 211 · OOP
  • CS 262 · Low-level programming
02

Data & systems

The layer I enjoy most: performance, memory, structures, and behavior below the interface.

  • CS 310 · Data Structures
  • CS 367 · Computer Systems
  • MATH 203 · Linear Algebra
03

Software in practice

Building for actual users, then testing and maintaining what ships.

  • SWE 205 · Usability
  • SWE 437 · Testing
  • CS 321 · Software Engineering
04

Theory & responsibility

The rules, tradeoffs, and responsibilities that shape technical decisions.

  • CS 330 · Formal Methods
  • CS 306 · Ethics & Law
  • MATH 125 · Discrete Math
Cagatay SagirBased in Ashburn
Working across borders

04 / The person behind it

I'm not chasing the longest stack list.

I do my best work when I can walk into an unclear problem, ask good questions, get something real working, and leave it easier for the next person to own.

Before tech, I worked in commercial sales with clients including Marriott, Hilton, and Disney. That experience shows up in my work every day: listen carefully, explain clearly, and remember that the person on the other side does not experience your implementation, they experience whether it helped.

2021Started Computer Science at George Mason2022Built my first client sites while working in commercial sales2024Turned the freelance work into a focused practice2026Built national web systems at The Salvation Army NHQNextReady to join a team and keep learning at a larger scale

05 / Let's talk

If the role needs someone who can think, build, and communicate, Count me in !

cagataysagir95@gmail.com LinkedIn GitHub Résumé