Escaping Status Theater

I still think about one migration project where everything was green until the final month. We did not have the luxury of extending the deadline. This was tied to external regulation and compliance, so missing the date was not really an option. We had to make it. Up until that point, the project had been reported as green. Then, almost […]

What Good Looks Like

A few companies back, my manager and I inherited a group of teams after layoffs. Confidence was already low. People didn’t believe in the systems we maintained. Stakeholders lost trust in what we did. Results were inconsistent, and even routine work needed more verification than it should have. We tried to steady things, but it was hard to know what […]

Managers Have Been Vibe Coding All Along

Everyone’s been talking about vibe coding lately. I’ve been doing it myself. Launched two projects. Okutaç and Caccepted. It’s the kind of work where you don’t analyze, architect, or overthink. You start simple. You come up with features. You poke at the product until it makes sense. You skip the logs, skip the diagrams, and rely on repetition and intuition […]

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 happened with the 2008 global financial crisis. Some took risks. Miscalculated. Misrepresented. Misaligned. So forth. Where did we end up? Entire markets froze. Liquidity vanished overnight. Companies collapsed […]