I have worked in technology companies in the US for a long time developing systems for making better decisions. I wrote a lot of good and bad code and led teams well or badly. I learned a lot in this process. I try hard to keep learning. This my hub for sharing what I learn.
I am interested in complex systems of all kinds. People systems, software systems, optimization systems, logistic systems, production systems. I am fascinated by emergence of higher level behaviour that cannot be deduced from the parts. I am amazed by similar type of strange quirks emerging in unrelated systems.
My educational background is in industrial engineering and operations research. I have BS and MS degrees from Middle East Technical University (ODTÜ) and a PhD degree from Arizona State University (ASU) all in industrial engineering. In my career I have mainly focused on building software systems for decision support based on optimization, simulation and heuristic algorithms. I have worked at Intel (2002-2010), Revionics (2010-2015) and Carvana (2015-2021) in engineering, product and engineering management roles.
After working for US tech companies for 20 years, I quit my awesome and high paying engineering job at Carvana in February 2021 and moved to Izmir, Turkey.
Like Travis McGee I am taking an
installment out of my retirement and become a parttime Flaneur like
Nassim Taleb (with much much less money and a kinder twitter game) and work on exactly what I want
and as much as I want to in a mediterranean pace for a few years.
My plan there is to start a company doing some consulting for US tech companies in partnership with Turkish
startups and work on a few web and data science product ideas of my own.
Wrote first lines of code for the filtering and optimization of the vehicle acquistion systems of Carvana.
Later built and led the team of data scientists and engineers who owned these systems.
(screenshot taken from public Carvana investor info deck - Feb 2021)