Writing
Essays on product, strategy, and AI.
2026
Jira in enterprise companies: person days, lead/cycle time and finance reportingFeaturedOne morning my product director walked up to my desk and said we would be sending finance a report every month. I said two day job. By the end of the third day I knew better.- Smart plug for autonomous energy managementA smart plug that recognises the appliance from its harmonic signature and forms a relay network with its neighbours. An undergraduate project at Yıldız Technical University, published as an IEEE paper.
- I have Claude write up my portfolio every morningFeaturedI know nothing about finance but I do have a portfolio. For twenty days I had forecasts written and scored. Mostly I learned a word: baseline.
Focus points in loyalty programme designFeaturedWhat makes a loyalty programme work is not points but the feeling of status. Design notes from the tourism and retail side.- What we went through with AI in 2025, in Turkey and globallyFeaturedA year that started with Cursor, the late reaction of companies in Turkey, and the bill for AI strategies built on volume rather than quality.
2024
Product management guide 1: getting to know a sector as a digital product managerFeaturedBefore you build a product you have to know the sector. What to look at in a market analysis, worked through an edtech example.
Product management guide 2: the core technologies a product should haveAgile, Kanban, prototyping, A/B tests, version control, CRM and payments. What a technical product manager needs to know and why.
2021
Data Science Notes: introduction to machine learningData, datasets, and why a dataset gets split in two. The first post in the series looks at the basic concepts of machine learning.
RabbitMQ and the AMQP protocol: I will listen to you too, just wait your turnRequests arriving at once were eating the memory of the machine. How a message queue solved it, and what AMQP and RabbitMQ actually are.
2020
Using Portainer: relief for developers who lost their enthusiasmManaging Docker images, containers and stacks from a browser. A step by step setup on a Google Cloud virtual machine.
Data Science Notes 8: Support vector regressionNotes I took while studying support vector regression: the epsilon margin, why it is called a support vector, and how it compares with polynomial regression.
Data Science Notes 7: Polynomial regressionOnce a variable takes a power above 1 the line becomes a curve. Comparing linear and polynomial regression on the same dataset.
Using the Swagger API test interfaceA few basic notes on Swagger: what it is, and how to set it up in an ASP.NET Core Web API project.
2019
Data Science Notes 6: Multiple linear regressionWorking with more than one independent variable: dummy variables, the P value and backward elimination.
Data Science Notes 5: Linear regressionThe idea of regression, simple linear regression and the least squares method, ending with a small scikit-learn example.
Data Science Notes 4: Feature scaling, normalisation, standardisationMaking the variables in a dataset comparable: normalisation and standardisation, and when to use which.
Data Science Notes 3: Data preprocessingFilling missing values, turning categorical attributes into numbers, and splitting a dataset into training and test sets.
Data Science Notes 2: Machine learning and PythonThe Python libraries we will use in this series: NumPy, Matplotlib, Pandas and scikit-learn, and why Python at all.
How do we add the OpenCV library to a Visual Studio project?Download opencv-3.2.0-vc14.exe from the release page. Clicking through the installer brings up the screen below.