I grew up in Izmir, Turkey, studied business management at Bilkent University on a full academic scholarship, and took a gap year in Australia — intending to stay a year. I never left.
During that gap year I discovered programming. I enrolled at TAFE Sydney, fell in love with building things, and found myself deep in the startup scene that's been my home for the past decade.
It's been a fantastic decade in the Sydney startup scene — I've loved being part of teams that build fast, care deeply about what they ship, and aren't afraid to do things differently.
- Building a new product from the ground up, with AI features at the core
- Designed and built Affiliate Management back office system
- Built KYC webhook integration with third-party provider
- Led 0-to-1 development of core zkEVM chain services with an 8-month cross-team technical roadmap
- Built production-grade Minting Service abstracting nonce management, gas estimation, and failure handling
- Designed public-facing NFT search & filter APIs for game studios and marketplaces
- Built zkProof-based chain data migration system; reconstructed Merkle tree from 300M blockchain events (Python)
- Led zero-downtime extraction of Asset Indexer from monolith; migrated event producers and consumers safely
- Built async NFT Metadata Refresh system enabling batch updates from game studios to marketplace platforms
- Developed TypeScript SDK using auto-generated OpenAPI clients
- Expanded Product API filtering/sorting capabilities and improved performance with JVM 11 upgrade
- Delivered MVP Node.js API on EKS to render React components outside WordPress, boosting site speed
- Migrated Node.js microservices from EKS to serverless, improving reliability under traffic spikes
- Built core Product APIs and integrated multiple third-party insurance APIs
- Led UI development for login/sign-up flows; introduced front-end tooling and standards
AI-powered reading list extraction. A CLI tool that pulls reading lists from Instagram images using OpenAI Vision API, matched against Open Library via a confidence-scored algorithm. Roadmap includes React/Next.js web interface, mobile app, and multi-platform ingestion (TikTok, YouTube, podcasts) with GoodReads integration.