About Me

I was born in the summer of 1966 — during the harvest season — in Karabük. As my mother tells it, right after I was born they marked my birthday on a calendar and rushed off to reap the crops in the fields. Once summer ended and all the winter preparations in the village were complete, they went to register my birth. But since they couldn't find the calendar on which they had marked my birthday, my date of birth was recorded as November 1st. I only learned my real birth day and month years later, by chance.

My entire primary, secondary, and high school education took place in Karabük's finest schools, where we had the privilege of being taught by some truly distinguished teachers of the era. Since Karabük was a working-class industrial town, the one goal shared by the children of workers, civil servants, and tradesmen alike was to study. As a result, the university success rates of this town's children were remarkably high in those years.

In 1983, I entered the Mathematics department at Hacettepe University. Because I was so good at mathematics, my high school friends asked me whether it had been my first choice. In fact, it was my last. At that time, university entrance exams were held in two stages, and choices were submitted before taking the exam. Although my first-stage exam went well, the second stage did not go as I had hoped, and I could not get into the program I truly wanted. When I started in the Mathematics department, I asked myself: "What will I do for a living once I graduate?" Two paths lay before me: I would either become a mathematics teacher (at a university or high school), or I would take the computer programming courses offered in the department and choose that profession. It was 1983; computers were barely part of our lives yet, but I chose this path. In fact, in my first year we wrote programs using punch cards — something most young people today have never heard of. In 1984, an Algorithms course I took from a professor visiting from METU became a turning point in my life. I loved programming so much that, for the rest of my student years, it would be fair to say I never left the computer lab.

After graduating, I completed my military service and began working at Siemens A.Ş. (then known as Simko) as a Systems Analyst-Programmer. It was one of the luckiest and finest periods of my life; that place became almost a second university for me. It was there that I learned how a software project is actually built. Back then there were no separate roles such as analyst or test engineer; as software developers, we handled the project management, the analysis of the work, and the testing of the code we developed.

My software development career, which began in 1988, continued at some of Türkiye's leading banks — Yapı Kredi Bank, Egebank, Türk Ticaret Bank, and Garanti Bank. After developing software at Mastercard for two more years, I stepped into a career in business analysis at Softtech, the technology arm of İşbank. Then, at Pazarama — an e-commerce company also affiliated with İşbank — I developed my experience on the product side. A large part of my career in the financial sector was spent in the field of payment systems. Drawing on this experience, I also worked for a time at Birleşik Ödeme ve Elektronik Para A.Ş. (United Payment), a fintech company. United Payment merged with Moka, an İşbank affiliate, and continues to operate today under the Moka United brand.

Toward the end of my forties, I began a master's degree in business administration at Beykent University, and I fell in love with being a student again. Encouraged by the then deputy director of the institute, Prof. Dr. Erkut Altındağ, I went on to pursue a doctorate, again in business administration. By the time I received my PhD in Business Management from Doğuş University, I was 57 years old. They say there is no age limit for learning — how true those words turned out to be.

Today I still work as a professional manager in IT, and I provide consultancy in payment systems and project development. Alongside this, I teach university students. Being able to contribute, even in a small way, to young people in academia makes me especially happy.

I designed and built this website using artificial intelligence — one of today's most popular subjects — and I thoroughly enjoyed the process. This site is a static website. My next step is to build a dynamic one; in particular, I aim to develop an e-commerce site by drawing on my experience in payment systems. As things progress, I will share my experiences of developing projects with artificial intelligence through the blog posts on my site.

With warm regards.