The Mirror Is Part of the Machine
The worst telemetry problems I have seen did not start with waste. They started when an incident happened. We could not see enough, and the missing field became the villain of t...
Engineering Articles
Software engineering, architecture, debugging, delivery, and the practical mechanics of building systems.
Breaking Up With WordPress After Two Decades
Around Black Friday last November, I moved my website from SiteGround to Bluehost. This was not some ambitious infrastructure decision. SiteGround wanted roughly five times more...
Incentives Drive Everything
In early modern France, the monarchy kept running into the same problem. Wars were expensive, revenue was not steady, and every obvious solution came with a political price. New...
The Janus Protocol
In the Roman Forum, there was a small shrine with double doors. When Rome was at war, the doors were left open. When Rome was at peace, the doors were closed. It is an oddly mod...
Managing Your Manager
Managers change more often than you realize, especially when a company is growing or downsizing. New roles, new org charts, new reporting lines. Other times, you’re shopping aro...
AI Broke Interviews
Interviewing has always been a big can of worms in the software industry. For years, big tech has gone with the LeetCode style questions mixed with a few behavioural and rounds....
Most of What We Call Progress
Most of what we call progress in software is just motion. New tools, new frameworks, same problems. Maybe fancier logos. Our industry always has this collective thrill that a ne...
Stop Wasting Brainpower
How many times have you found yourself saying: “I worked all day, but I didn’t get anything done.” I know, we have all been there. We feel bad about it, too. On the surface, it...
Why Over-Engineering Happens
If you’ve worked in software long enough, you’ve probably seen it: a CRUD app serving a handful of users, deployed on a Kubernetes cluster with half the CNCF landscape stitched...
Climbing No More
Engineers have been reaching a common ceiling in their careers for decades. The pattern goes like this: an individual contributor gets promoted to a senior software engineer, an...
The Weekly Win
If you happen to work for a large organization, you’ve probably heard of quarterly checkins or some similar corporate buzzword to describe what you’ve done and what you could ha...
Technical Deep Dives
When someone asks for a technical deep dive, they don’t care if . They want proof that you actually understand the beast you’ve built. Can you walk me through the system like yo...
Yapay Zekâ Çağında Bilgisayar Mühendisliği
Son aylarda, ister posta kutumdan, ister web sitem üzerinden, isterse tanıdıklar aracılığıyla olsun, hep aynı soruya cevap veriyorum: “2025’te bilgisayar bilimi okumak hâlâ mant...
From Idea to Launch in 2 Weeks
Everyone’s been talking about LLMs. I didn’t want to be too late to the party. When everyone’s talking about doomsdays scenarios, I just wanted to see for myself. As an engineer...
Reflecting on Software Engineering Handbook
One year. May 2024. Back then, we were riding high, celebrating the launch of this with an amazing . Five days of glaciers and waterfalls, finally enjoying the fact that we fini...
Take Self Reviews Seriously
This isn’t the first and definitely won’t be the last time I find myself in a conversation about the importance of self checkins, performance reviews, and all that socalled “ref...
Tech Hiring Bubble Bursts
I wasn’t around in the 90s, but people who were say it was incredible. If you could code, you were set. Talent was rare. There were almost everywhere. In the 2000s and early 201...
The Reality of an Employer's Market
Lately, Iʼve seen a lot of posts about what employers should do or how they should treat candidates, what benefits they should offer, and how they should run their interviews. I...
Balancing Act of Reliability
Once something is in production, you are no longer just building software. You are also keeping it alive. That sounds obvious, but teams forget it all the time. We get excited a...
Building Trust in Engineering Teams
We all know that transparency builds trust. The lack of it? Well, that can lead to major issues. Engineers sometimes join teams and, from the start, struggle with trust. It’s as...
Celebrating Our Book in Iceland
To celebrate the release of our new book, , Ender and I took a nice trip to Iceland. Here’s a relaxed recap of our fiveday journey. Day 1: The Golden Circle We kicked off our tr...
Operational Skills Needed
Over the years, I've interviewed many candidates. One crucial skill that often gets overlooked is operational reflexes during oncalls. Surprisingly, few companies test for this,...
On Writing Software Engineering Handbook
I’m thrilled to share the story behind our newly published book with you. This project has been a labor of friendship and collaboration, and I hope our journey resonates with yo...
Working with Dependencies
If you are part of a large organization, the term "dependencies” probably means more than . In a big organization, when we talk about "dependencies," we're diving into more than...
Engineering Health Essentials
Engineering health is a term that deserves far more attention than it receives. Sustainable software development is not only about the features we ship or the speed at which we...
Should Dev Managers Code?
As someone who's been navigating the world of software development for a while, I often think about what it really means to be a good development manager. It's a bit like being...
Winning Eleven
Here's 'Winning Eleven,' my own mix of eleven key ideas that have helped me grow both at work and in life. This isn't your usual list of tips. It's more like a collection of rea...
Coding in Leadership
When you start coding, you start the adventure. It feels like unlocking a new world of logic and creativity. From programming classes where we tried to solve pyramid programs to...
Cracking Coding Bottlenecks
In software development, we obsess over component benchmarks and algorithmic complexity, chasing milliseconds latency and BigO wins. But, time and after time, I’ve found that th...
Becoming a Rockstar Engineer
In the software development realm, people often debate about 10x engineers or rockstars. But what does that really mean? How can you become one? There isn’t an easy answer, but...
Silent Guardians of Quality
In the realm of software development, testers are the silent guardians. Their role is often misunderstood and underappreciated, especially when they do their job so well that no...
Why You Should Read More Code
In university, I have master students studying software engineering. I often ask them one question: how do authors become authors? Do they suddenly start writing great novels in...
Restful Sleep: The Ultimate Debugger
Coding can be tough. Even the best get stuck with tricky errors. But many forget one helpful trick: sleep. Software engineers often work late. We get so into our work, we think,...
Estimation Accuracy
Estimating software projects is basically the tech equivalent of arguing about Irish weather. Everyone has an opinion, nobody really knows anything, and the forecast changes all...
Why Legacy Systems Are Worth Your Time
I know. When you hear legacy, you think , , weird edge cases, and “what the hell just broke now.” Every moment feels frustrating. You don’t know what the next change will trigge...
Why Metrics Don’t Equal Quality
In 1902, Hanoi was drowning in rats. The government was getting nervous about plague. Hence, the city put a bounty per rat tail. Suddenly, the system had a scoreboard, something...
Teaching Software Engineering
As a software engineering instructor, I’ve taught a diverse group of master’s students with varying technical backgrounds. Not everyone comes in with the same level of expertise...
System Design Interviewing Tips
System design interviews are inherently subjective. Outcomes depend on many factors, including the backgrounds of both the interviewer and the candidate. Even if both have exper...
Engineering Strategy and Planning
Strategy is a word that's often used but rarely understood. Ask ten people what it means, and you'll get ten different answers. I often see people confuse it with , a quarterly...
Data as a Product is a Promise
Domaindriven design (DDD) has been around for quite a long time. In short, DDD focuses on domain to match domain requirements. One of the pillars of DDD is bounded context. A bo...
Update Statements on Production
Executing update statements on a production database is always a big challenge. It’s one of those tasks that looks deceptively simple until something breaks in ways you didn’t i...
Engineering Roles and Responsibilities
Engineering roles exist whether you define them or not. In some teams, ownership is explicit. People know who drives incident management, who keeps an eye on risk, who pushes on...
Essential Engineering Principles
Engineering principles give teams a practical foundation for how to build and operate software. They guide decisions, shape behaviours, and help groups stay aligned even as syst...
Pulling the Plug from a Project
Every project starts with high hopes to deliver one or more business values. The team begins with the requirement analysis and then carries on with design and development. On th...
Addressing Technical Debt
Tech debt occurs when we solve a software problem with our limited understanding of the business at the time. We start building a solution to get feedback as early as possible....
Building a Technical Vision
A technical vision is the compass of an engineering organization. It sets the longterm direction. I believe it should define the "why" and "where" behind the technical choices t...
Service Overload Strategies
Service overload happens a lot. If you haven't seen one, count yourself lucky. The first time I watched it take a system down, I realized how serious it’s to get the basics righ...
Designing A Key-Value Store
I’ve been asked once to design a key value store in an interview. It looks easy at first. Then it gets hard, fast. What makes it interesting is how ambiguous it is. I started us...
Promoting Learnings in Incidents
Incidents are used for the negative consequences of an action. The incident comes from an action that fails to result in the expected outcome. For instance, deploying a code to...
M1 işlemcili MacBook Pro
Bir iki sene önce aldığım MacBook Pro'dan oldukça şikayetçiydim. Bunu bir bir kaç başlıkta dile getirmiştim. Bunun üzerinden 2 sene geçti. Benim gibi birçok kullanıcı da problem...
Code Author
Throughout the years I have worked on many software projects. In most of them, the code header included the authorʼs name. At first, it seemed natural to have the authorʼs name....
Risk Comes First
You probably saw many cliché stuff about risking everything. Not risking is the biggest risk and all. While there is a truth to that, risk needs to be an appetite. Remember what...
Message Brokers Are Modern Grids
While working on my book on , I keep noticing the same pattern. Some systems look simple while they belong to one team and become something else after everybody starts using the...
Leetcode Hard
Over the years, I’ve been on both sides of the interview table. To become better at conducting interviews and preparing for my own, I spent time solving and reviewing coding pro...
Verifying passed arguments partially
Recently, I was working on a project and I missed a case in unit tests. I didn't want to verify each argument but rather wanted to check if an object has a certain attribute set...
Compatibility Is a Feature
A system only reveals what it's made of when it starts changing. At first, they often look better than they are because the code is still new. The data is still fairly clean. Th...
Yazılım Mühendisliği Kariyer Merdiveni
Yazılım şirketleri, mühendislik mesleği seviyelerini dikkatlice oluşturmalı ve çalışanlardan ne beklendiğini, roller arasındaki farkı ve kariyer gelişimi için alanları açıklayan...
Good APIs Age Slowly
I have noticed that APIs are a bit like abstractions in general. APIs that impress people quickly are very often the ones that cause the most trouble later. I do not mean this a...
Before You Import That Library
Software development depends a lot on open source projects. From operating systems to editors, we use open source software everywhere. Nevertheless, we should be careful about w...
On Writing Wrapper Libraries
A wrapper library is a thin layer of abstraction around an existing library, dependency, or functionality. A wrapper library offers a better and cleaner interface or rather hide...
Yeni MacBook Pro
Uzun yıllardır MacBook kullanıyorum ve hiçbir zaman verilen paraya kıyasla alınan verim anlamında MacBook Pro'yu beğenmedim. Bu konudaki yaklaşımım cihazın kalitesinden çok her...
Minimum Viable Agile
In , I criticized agile frameworks for bringing too much complexity with too little impact. What was meant to make teams more adaptive often ends up doing the opposite. They slo...
What's wrong with Agile Frameworks
Some time ago, I attended a course and became . It wasn’t a huge deal. I was already doing the job. But as time went on and I gained more experience, my view of agile frameworks...
The Real Work Is Social
I get along with people. I talk, I joke, I do the normal office stuff. But even with that, something about how work actually works has always felt off. You think the job is most...
Simple Mutual Exclusion
When we design services for high availability, we often deploy more than one instance of the same application. It might be two servers behind a load balancer or a few nodes shar...
Hype in Software Development
We live in a time when every month brings a new framework, library, or architectural pattern that promises to change everything. Increasingly often, we come across a new technol...
Why I like JavaScript
Every programming language has its oddities and challenges. When it comes to JavaScript, it has Every programming language has its oddities and challenges. When it comes to Java...
How Teams Choose Language
Choosing a programming language is one of the most defining decisions in software development. It shapes how a team writes, maintains, and reasons about their system. Today, the...
Yazılım için İngilizce Öğrenin
Geçenlerde sitem üzerinden bir eposta aldım. Yazılım mimarisi ödevine yardım edebilir misiniz diye soruyordu. Meşgul olduğumu ama zaten internette benden bu konuyu daha iyi açık...
I'm no longer a Scrum Master
Recently, I received an email from Scrum Alliance. My Scrum Master Certificate has expired. As expected, the email was suggesting to get certified again, a friendly nudge to sta...
You Know State Is NO Good
Every engineer learns this the hard way. You think the logic is solid, your tests are green, and your deployment goes smoothly. Looks all good, right? Then you have an outage. N...
Refactoring Untested Code
Most teams realize they are dealing with a legacy repo only when a tiny change turns into an operation. A oneline fix suddenly needs three people, two days of manual checks, and...
Duplicate code isn't that bad
Duplicate code isn’t something we usually want in our code for various reasons. The most obvious one is maintenance. When you change a piece of logic, you have to find every pla...
How I Work as a Software Engineer
When I started out, I thought productivity meant speed. Ship fast, fix fast, move fast. Working in startups taught me something different. When everything around you changes con...
Smaller is Faster
“Smaller is faster” is a wellknown hardware design principle, as you might already know it. Generally speaking, smaller pieces of hardware will be faster than larger ones becaus...
You Cannot Fix What You Cannot See
I have been working on this data discovery tool for a while, and it keeps showing me how messy our systems really are. The idea behind it is simple. Crawl every database we have...
Ufak Servisler
Ufak servisler(micro services) son zamanlarda yazılım alanında sıkça yaygınlaşan bir yöntem. Micro'yu ufak diye çevirmek hoşuma gitti ama tahminen mikro daha çok kullanılır. Zat...
Who needs an Architect?
An architect? According to Wikipedia, an architect is a person who plans, designs, and oversees the construction of buildings. So, we obviously have derived the role from civil...
Shoulder Ship It
Pair programming is no new topic and has been widely used in the industry. At first, it might seem like itʼs a waste of time because two coders work in the same station. However...
Scrum, Kanban, or just Agile
Before going deep in the subject, I would like to emphasize that this post is completely personal. You miBefore going deep into the subject, I would like to emphasize that this...
Consistency Matters
When I look back at the projects I’ve worked on, the most peaceful moments were always when the code felt consistent. Everything lined up. Names made sense. Files looked familia...
Local vs Production Debugging
I have been debugging this data workflow tool we built in house lately. It has an Angular UI and a Java backend, and it moves data between different systems like Postgres to Hiv...
Mock methods that manipulate parameters
Recently, I've worked a little bit on cache for . I needed to mock a behavior of a method where the method manipulates given parameters e.g. change state or call another method....
A guide for Code Reviews
Code reviews shouldn’t be about ego. Still, every time you send one, you’re putting yourself out there. You want your work reviewed but at the same time it makes you vulnerable....
Java Developer vs. Software Engineer
Java developer vs. software engineer is discussed quite often, especially among programmers trying to define what truly separates a coder from an engineer. One of my friends kep...
Açık Kaynak Lisansları
Açık kaynaklı yazılımlar her geçen gün daha da yaygınlaşıyor. Artık herkes açık kaynaklı yazılımlarla karşılaşıyor, en basit örnek Android işletim sistemi. Bugün sadece bireysel...
Moving from Java to Python
I recently started a new role in AWS networking, and it’s the first time I’ve gone from writing everything in Java to writing almost everything in Python. Honestly, the shift is...
Spring Cache Abstraction
Spring cache abstraction applies caching to the Java methods. It provides an environment where we can cache the result for the methods we choose. By doing so, it improves the pe...
Implementing HTML5 Bomberman
CS102 is one of the most important course in CS curriculum. In this course, students learn how to write recursive function, objectoriented programming and etc. This course provi...
Yazılım Mühendisliği Mülakatlarına Hazırlık Rehberi
Yazılım mühendisliği mülakatları her geçen gün daha da zorlaşıyor. Mülakatlara iyi bir sonuç almak ise yılların birikimi ve insanın mülakat esnasındaki performansı ile doğru ora...
JavaScript Execution Context
JavaScript developers do not pay attention much on internals of JavaScript execution, namely execution context. Even experienced JavaScript developers may lack necessary knowled...
Dependency Injection in JavaScript
Dependency injection is about removing the hard coded dependencies and providing way of changing dependencies in compiletime or runtime. This pattern has been exercised in sever...
Achieving Abstraction In JavaScript
In computer science, abstraction is to hide certain details and only show the essential features of the object. Abstraction tries to reduce and factor out details so that the de...
Buggy Code on Production, Survived
Areca is the name of the billing engine I am working on for Turk Telekom. Funny enough, it is also the name of the flowers we bought to freshen the office. We wanted the office...
XA Transactions: A Simple Guide
In early days of computing, there was no need for distributed transactions, everything lived in one place. As number of applications increased, synchronization of the data becom...
Faster JavaScript
JavaScript is a very important language for now and the future. Nowadays, there is no page that does not include some JavaScript code in it. Moreover, code written in JavaScript...
Caching With Guava
In computer science, cache is a component that is used to speed up data retrieval in general. The data stored in cache is limited so a given query can hit or miss the data that...
Çevik Yazılım
Çevik yazılım geliştirme, bir takım yazılım geliştirme yönteminden ibarettir. Bu yöntemler, yazılımın ve gereksinimlerin birbiriyle etkileşim halinde tutarak ortaya koyulmuş sür...
Cepheye Yönelik Programlama
Yazılım dünyasında başlıca endişelerinden biri, yazılımdaki parçaların biri birine çok bağlanmasıdır(high coupling, crosscutting concerns). Bu durum yazılımın belirli bir noktad...
Mediator
Bu yazımda size Mediator adındaki nesneye dayalı yazılım şablonunu (ObjectOriented Design Pattern) anlatacağım.Mediator bize, bjeler arasında fazla bağ kurmadan (tightcoupled) i...
Strategy
Bu yazımda size Strategy adındaki nesneye dayalı yazılım şablonunu (ObjectOriented Design Pattern) anlatacağım. Bu şablonun genel amacı yapılacak iş için alternatifler oluşturup...
Composite
Bu yazımda size Composite adındaki nesneye dayalı yazılım şablonunu (ObjectOriented Design Pattern) anlatacağım. Bu şablonun genel amacı tekrarlanan(recursive) parçaları(compone...
Observer
Bu yazımda size Observer adındaki nesneye dayalı yazılım şablonunu (ObjectOriented Design Pattern) anlatacağım. Bu şablonun genel amacı bir objeyle başka objeler arasında bağ ku...
Facade
Bu yazımda size Facade adındaki nesneye dayalı yazılım şablonunu (ObjectOriented Design Pattern) anlatacağım. Bu şablon(pattern) genelde birden fazla pakete (package) aynı anda...
Adapter
Bu yazımda size Adapter adında nesneye dayalı yazılım şablonunu (ObjectOriented Design Pattern) anlatacağım. Bu yazılım şablonu genellikle daha önce yazılan bir kodun başka bir...
Abstract Factory
Bu yazımda size Abstract Factory adındaki nesneye dayalı yazılım şablonunu (ObjectOriented Design Pattern) anlatacağım. Abstract factory, bir veya birden fazla nesnenin farklı t...
Factory
Bu yazımda size Factory adındaki nesneye dayalı yazılım şablonunu (ObjectOriented Design Pattern) anlatacağım. Factory şablonunu şöyle anlatayım. Painte benzer bir program yazma...
Singleton
Bu yazımda size Singleton adındaki nesneye dayalı yazılım şablonunu(ObjectOriented Design Pattern) anlatacağım. Singleton benim en çok kullandığım dizayn şablonlarından biri. Bu...
Yazılım Mimarisi
Mimari denildiğinde insanın aklına gelebilecek ilk konu değildir yazılım. Ama nasıl köprüler, barajlar gibi büyük yapıtların bir mimariye ihtiyacı varsa, geniş kapsamlı yazılım...
Inheritance ve Polymorphism
Polymorphism ve Inheritance beraber kullanılan iki önemli nesneye dayalı (ObjectOriented) programlama unsurudur. Bunlar program kodlarının yeniden kullanılabilmesi veya var olan...
Linux mu Windows mu?
Aslında bayağıdır yazmıyordum sitede ama bir arkadaşın sorusu üzerine birkaç satır bir şeyler karalayayım dedim. Arkadaş bize Linux tabanlı işletim sistemlerinin avantaj ve deza...
Antivirüs İncelemesi
Yazıma başlamadan önce antivirüs programları hakkında söyleceğım çoğu şeyin kendi bilgi, kanaatime ve tecrübelerime dayandığını belirtmek istiyorum. Bana güveniyorsanız buyrun a...
Binary Search Tree
Binary Search Tree (BST), bilgisayar biliminde arama, ekleme ve silme işlemlerini ortalama O(log n) zamanla gerçekleştirebildiği için temel veri yapılarından biridir. BST’nin gü...
RAM(Random Access Memory)
RAM, bilgisayarda geçici olarak bilgi depoladığımız hafıza birimidir. Zaten çoğu kişinin de bildiği gibi elektriği kestiğimiz anda içindeki bilgiler silinir. Yani kalıcı değil,...
Quick Sort
Birçok bilgisayar bilimi dersinde Quick Sort’u defalarca işledik, analiz ettik, hatta sınavlarda bile çözdük. Ama çoğu zaman öğrendiğimiz şeyleri pratiğe dökmeden bırakıyoruz. İ...
SSL(Secure Socket Layer)
İnternette gezerken bazen adres çubuğunda normal http yerine https ile başlayan adresler görürüz. Özellikle giriş yapılan sayfalarda, webmail sistemlerinde, bankacılık işlemleri...
Use of Pointers For Lists
C++’ta diziler sabit uzunlukludur; yani program çalışırken bir diziyi doğrudan büyütüp küçültmek mümkün değildir. Bu yüzden, eleman ekleyip silmeyi destekleyen dinamik bir liste...
Bilgisayar Tarihi
Bilgisayarın tarihi aslında sandığımızdan çok daha eskiye dayanıyor. Bugün masamızda duran ya da cebimize sığan cihazların bu hale gelmesi öyle bir anda olmamış. Arkasında yüzle...
Java Link List Implementation
Linked List (bağlı liste), verileri bellek üzerinde dinamik şekilde saklamamızı sağlayan temel veri yapılarından biridir. Dizilerde eleman sayısı sabitken, bağlı listeler ihtiya...
FSB
FSB(Front Side Bus) işlemci ile anakart arasındaki bilgi akışını sağlayan bir ünitedir. Bu ünite işlemci(CPU) ile bilgisayarın diğer parçaları arasındaki iletişimi sağlar. Bunu...
Pointer Şeması
C++’ta pointer şeması, bir nesnenin bellekte nerede yaşadığını, hangi pointer’ın ona sahip olduğunu ve ne zaman serbest bırakılması gerektiğini anlamanın temel yoludur. Düşük se...
Selection Sort
Selection Sort, en basit sıralama algoritmalarından biridir ve özellikle algoritma mantığını öğrenirken sıkça kullanılır. Bu yöntemde amaç, dizinin her adımında geri kalan bölüm...
Heap-Allocated 2D Structures in C++
C++ öğrenirken en çok zorlanılan konulardan biri, işin mutfağı olan manuel bellek yönetimi ve pointer yapılarıdır. Bugün çoğu modern dil bizim için bellekle ilgilense de, C++ hâ...
Programlama Dilleri Tarihi
Programlama dillerini ilk ciddi ciddi Bilkent Üniversitesi’ndeki derslerde görmüştüm. Programming Languages dersinde bayağı farklı şeylere dokunuyorduk. Genelde başlangıç Java i...
A Basic Pointer Example
C++’ta pointer kavramı, dilin düşük seviyeli kontrol anlayışının temel parçasıdır. Burada artık yalnızca değerlerle değil, bu değerlerin bellekte nerede durduğu ile ilgilenilir....
Type Casting
Type casting çoğu zaman küçük bir teknik detay gibi anlatılır. Bir parantez açarsın, hedef tipi yazarsın, kod çalışır. Ama tip dönüşümü aslında bir karar mekanizmasıdır. Bir değ...
Pass By Reference
C++’ta fonksiyon çağrılarında en temel ayrımlardan biri şudur: Fonksiyona bir değerin kendisini mi gönderiyorsun, yoksa o değerin kendisine erişimi mi veriyorsun. Bu ayrım küçük...
Hello World
I am starting this blog, even though I do not really know what I am doing yet. I see engineers blogging and sharing what they learn. It looks cool, and it feels like a good habi...