About
Product manager who also ships the code. I came from electrical engineering and work on on-device AI and cloud cost (FinOps).
I am Abdullah Faruk. I work as a product manager, but the kind who also writes the code for what he specs.
I started with machine learning while studying electrical engineering at Yıldız Technical University. In 2018 we finished a smart plug project that tried to recognise an appliance from its harmonic signature, and the work turned into an IEEE paper. What stayed with me was how much everything around the model decided the outcome. If the data does not arrive, or the interface does not earn trust, the score the model got stops mattering.
After that my path went into retail. On the product side I worked where e-commerce and physical stores meet: loyalty programmes, customer segmentation, campaign mechanics. Loyalty design interested me most, because it deals directly with human psychology. People hate losing a status they earned, and a good programme knows how to use that feeling without exploiting it.
These days I work in FinOps. I treat cloud spend as a product problem you can measure and manage: making it visible where the money goes across Claude and the other hyperscaler platforms, and getting teams to own their own costs. The habit retail left me with still applies, it matters who sees a number, when, and which decision it is meant to drive.
I am currently studying econometrics at Istanbul University. Coming from engineering into product, the thing I missed most was knowing when a number is actually saying something.
Work
All my apps go out under Zort Productions. It started as a game studio; today eight apps carry the name: two puzzle games, a document assistant, a prayer times app, a retro asset studio, a keep-in-touch reminder and a LiDAR measuring tool. Five are live on the stores. I do all of it myself, from design to store copy.
Starting with games was not an accident. Games are the most honest laboratory for product design: people open a SaaS tool because work requires it and close a game the moment they are bored, so you cannot fool yourself about retention. In Sequences I built a system that generates puzzle difficulty from the player’s own performance, so everyone plays at their own threshold. In GuessFour the question was how much information to hand the player: give too much and the puzzle solves itself, give too little and it turns into guessing. Two habits carried straight over into the later apps, solving onboarding with design rather than explanation, and treating the feeling of progress as more decisive than actual progress.
They share one constraint: processing stays on the device. No account, no server, no collected data. I set that boundary up front. It limits what I can build and what I could ever sell.
The product I spend most time on is Tacet, a document assistant that runs entirely on device. You hand it a spreadsheet and get a new one back with the formulas wired up, and the whole thing happens on your phone or your laptop. There is no networking code in it: not a tracker that was switched off or an analytics SDK behind a flag, but no code that could open a connection at all. The terminal version is open source and I want to open more of it over time. A product that makes a privacy claim should make that claim checkable: “we do not send your data” is a commitment when the code can be read, and only a marketing line when it cannot.
What I write
I started in 2019 with a series of data science notes. Explaining what I was learning turned out to be a good way to learn it, so I kept going. Along the way there are practical pieces on tools like Swagger, Portainer and RabbitMQ. In recent years I moved towards product: a product management guide, loyalty programme design, and where AI genuinely helps.
Most posts are published in both Turkish and English. You can switch languages from the top right.
What I use
I have been writing code since I was a child and never settled on a single platform. Mobile, web, desktop, form applications, embedded systems; I have built something in all of them. There is hardly a programming language I have not touched: GitHub counts around forty across my repositories. I cannot say I put any of them down either, in a single week I will write Python, TypeScript, Go, C#, Swift and Kotlin. The language follows the job, and the job keeps changing.
AI integration and data pipelines on the product side. I work with on-device models and keep the cloud out of my own apps where I can.
Turkish is my native language, English B1, Arabic A2.
Get in touch
Email is fastest. Write if you disagree with something I wrote, if you see something we could work on together, or if you want to recommend a good book.