Mick Zijdel

Catalyze Impact incubates new AI Safety organisations. I was their first employee, and for a year and a half I co-ran the incubation program:

• Recruitment: finding promising founders through personalised outreach and social media campaigns.
• Selection: reviewing applications and test tasks, and interviewing candidates.
• Program design and logistics: designing the program, arranging speakers and venues, and organising events and trips.
• Participant support: handling requests from founders during, before and after the program.

I also built the systems everythin ran on using Airtable bases and Python scripts that automated the repetitive parts of recruitment and selection, and I made some really great spreadsheets.

ML4Good runs 10-day intensive bootcamps that take people from “interested in AI Safety” to actually working on it. I was a teaching assistant at the March 2025 Europe camp where I taught the sessions on AI Agents, Adversarial Attacks, and AI Safety strategy, and coached participants through the rest of the curriculum.

Because the atmosphere at a bootcamp is just as important as the curriculum, I also ran the social side, including a welcome event, a murder mystery, lightning talks, and a Scottish ceilidh.

Vischeck makes an AI agent screenshot its own UI changes and actually look at them before reporting back. Agents are happy to call a layout “good” based on a diff changes they never rendered. This package of hook, skill, and CLI tmakes them take an authenticated screenshot of the local dev server and make them look first.

The screenshot CLI handles dev-server auth automatically, and supports dark mode, mobile viewports, element-level captures, and batch screenshots of whole page sets. The hook fires whenever the agent edits a view or template file, so visual verification happens by default.

AI coding agents love saying “this should work now” about code that has never even been run. Dev Hooks is a collection of Claude Code hooks and skills that make sure they do check their work and apply best practices without having to prompt them yourself all the time.

Also includes my personal dev-env setup, built on mise.

The Edinburgh Festival Fringe programme lists around 3,500 shows. I used to read it cover-to-cover, but that still didn’t tell me much about the shows themselves, so I built the tool I wanted instead: a chat interface where you can just ask the programme what you should go see.

Under the hood it’s a RAG pipeline which does semantic search over the festival data with ChromaDB vector storage, category filtering, and a FastAPI backend serving a React/TypeScript frontend.

Spotify Tools allows you to set listening goals for your favorite artists, albums, and tracks. The application syncs with your Spotify listening history and helps you reach your goals by generating personalized playlists based on your preferences and what you need to listen to. It also gives you detailed statistics of your listening history.

Unfortunately, Spotify no longer verifies small apps from individual developers, so it is not publicly accessible. If you would like to try it, please contact me with your email and I can give you access.

Artwork from “Ethics Town” podcast

I compose music for theatre and other performance and narrative art.

Podcasts

Themes for audio fiction podcasts.

Short Scoring Projects

Sketches

Short pieces I made for university assignments but did not develop into a full piece.

Theatre Composing

Theatre Sound Design

Other

I wrote my dissertation on “Ancient Rock Music: the sound stalactites” make when hit by a rubber mallet. The project was inspired by a visit to Luray Caverns, Virginia, home of the “Great Stalacpipe Organ”: an instrument that plays the cave itself.

The work had three parts: a physical simulation of struck stalactites using finite-difference and modal methods (approximating them as cantilever bars of variable diameter, in Matlab), a field trip to record real stalactites, and a virtual instrument built in C++ with JUCE so anyone can play a cave from their Digital Audio Workstation.

Photo from “Mary: A Gig Theatre Show”. Credit: Carla Watson

I work as a freelance sound designer and general organiser in theatre. See also the theatre I did as a student.

Theatre

• Mary: A Gig Theatre Show: Sound Designer
  • Bedlam Theatre (January 2024)
  • Edinburgh Fringe (August 2024)
  • Traverse Theatre (December 2024)
  • Duns Play Fest (May 2025)
  • Edinburgh Fringe (August 2025)
• 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee: Edinburgh Fringe (August 2024)

ImpAmp is the soundboard Bedlam Theatre uses for live improv comedy, where a sound effect is only funny if you can find it before the performers move on. It supports multiple soundbanks, instant search, arming tracks, multiple sounds per pad, and Google Drive sync so you can share your soundbanks with the whole team

This third version was also an experiment in AI-driven development: I built it in Next.js using Claude 3.7 Sonnet and Gemini 2.5 back when agentic AI coding was just a month old. It has been running real shows ever since.

During university (and a little after), I took part in over thirty productions and festivals as production manager, producer, director, technician, composer, and actor. I also spent two years on the committee of the Edinburgh University Theatre Company, the student company that fully operates the Bedlam Theatre: as Business Manager and later President, I helped reopen the theatre after the covid-19 pandemic and led its return as an Edinburgh Fringe venue in 2023.

Shows marked * took place in the Bedlam Theatre

Festivals

• Paradok Platform - Fringe Director - August 2024 (Just the Tonic during the Edinburgh Fringe)
• Bedlam Festival - Festival Director and Co-Programmer - January 2024 *
• Paradok Platform - Fringe Coordinator - August 2023 (Just the Tonic during the Edinburgh Fringe)
• Bedlam Festival - IT Manager - January 2023 *
• Give it a Go Week - Venue Manager - January 2023 *
• Paradok Platform - Treasurer - August 2022 (Just the Tonic during the Edinburgh Fringe)
• Freshers’ Plays - Creative Director/Coordinator - September 2022 *
• Welcome Week - Creative Director/Coordinator - September 2022 *
• Festival of New Theatre in Scotland - Programmer - March 2022 (Teviot Underground)
• Scottish Online Student Drama Festival - March 2021 (Online)

Shows

• Whatever You Want - Producer - April 2024 (Embassy Gallery)
• Glangtivity - Director - December 2023 *
• The Welkin - Sound and Projection Manager - October 2023 *
• Guards, Guards! - Composer - October 2023 *
• Julius Caesar - Production Manager - March 2023 (Teviot Debating Hall)
• Into the Pantoverse - Producer - December 2022 *
• The Rip Current - Co-Sound Designer - August 2022 (Pleasance Above)
• Ondine - Producer - March 2022 (Teviot Underground)
• A Midsummer Night’s Dream - Production Manager - March 2022 (Assembly Roxy - Central)
• Bedlam Haunted House - Composer/Sound Designer - October 2021 *
• Songs from the Bedlam - Creative Director - October 2021 *
• Catching Up - Tech Manager/Sound Designer - August 2021 (theSpace @ Symposium Hall)
• Zoogmalion - Producer - February 2021 (online)
• Trials and Tribulations - Lighting Designer - January 2020 *
• The Odyssey in 60 Minutes - Co-Director/Writer - January 2020 *
• William Shakespeare’s Christmas Carol - Sound Designer - November 2019 *

The Rip Current

Guards! Guards!

Acting

• Princess Ida - April 2025 (Pleasance Theatre)
• Glangtivity - December 2024 *
• Biolanthe - April 2024 (Summerhall)
• HMS Pinafore - April 2023 *

Committees

I was President (2022-2023) and Business Manager (2021-2022) for the Edinburgh University Theatre Company, who fully operate the Bedlam Theatre, and Treasurer (2022-2023), President (2021-2022), and Secretary (2020-2021) for Theatre Paradok. During my time, we reopened the theatre after the covid-19 pandemic and I led the efforts for our return as a venue to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2023.