Blog
There is no marketing copy here. I write about what I did when an app was rejected on the App Store, which backend I picked and why, and the steps I took to make a site visible on Google — the things I actually went through. Some of it is a note to my future self, and some of it is here in case it helps someone stuck on the same problem.
Putting the model in the cloud is the easy path. In most of the R&D work I designed I chose to run it on the phone instead; this post covers what that decision bought me and what it cost.
Read the postThe app crashed for some users only. The cause was not the device but its language setting — and it came down to a single letter.
Read the postChoosing the model was the easy part. The hard part was the gap between the clean lab photo in the open dataset and the picture a farmer takes in a hurry, in the shade.
Read the postI released my first apps on the Play Store and moved to iOS a year later. Staged rollouts, test channels, Data Safety and the target API requirement — the real differences between the two app stores.
Read the postThe moment an app is most useful is often the moment the internet is not working. The decisions and the trade-offs of offline-first architecture, seen through the design of Sağlam and the QR verification in Vakti Geçmeden.
Read the postUsers don't report an app that crashes, they delete it. From symbolication to prioritization, my routine for tracking crashes after a release.
Read the postA one-sentence product rule — first to find it wins — turns into a race condition problem on the backend. Here is how I built the single-winner guarantee in Mysterious Treasure.
Read the postThe buyer will not send the money first and the seller will not hand over the ticket first. In 2.El Bilet I broke that deadlock not with a single button but with an escrow flow built from states that wait on each other.
Read the postI moved to Swift in 2021 and have worked in the Apple ecosystem ever since. This post is an honest account of the rejections I collected along the way and the things I wish I had known for my first app.
Read the postI stopped writing the same product twice. What a single codebase gained me, what I gave up in return, and how my native experience paid off once I started writing Flutter.
Read the postThe vehicle routing problem is NP-hard: as the number of stops grows, an exact solution becomes impossible in practice. While designing RotaAkıl I saw that the gap between “optimal” and “good enough” is really a product decision.
Read the postThe bill tracks the number of reads, not the size of your data. Five patterns that inflate the cost: reads with no cache, listeners left open, N+1 queries, lists without pagination, and fetching everything just to count it.
Read the postI moved from Java to Swift in 2021, and what I wrote in those first weeks was really Java in Swift syntax. Through my own mistakes I go over where each old reflex misfired: optionals, value types, dispatch behavior in protocol extensions, ARC and closure capture lists.
Read the postLocalization is not translation. What has to change when you go global — from text length to currency, from regional pricing to the hour you send notifications.
Read the postWriting my first Android app in Java in 2020, I fell into every trap one by one — from losing all the data when the screen rotated to memory leaks. In this post I go through the lifecycle, context leaks, the habits left over from the AsyncTask era and null checking, all through my own mistakes.
Read the postI added Kotlin later to the Android projects I had written in Java in 2020. Instead of converting everything at once, I moved file by file. This post covers why platform types punch a hole in null safety, the spot that blows up at runtime when you use data classes with Firestore, how extension functions took the place of my Utils classes, and how I wrapped Firebase calls while moving from AsyncTask to coroutines — including the Java calls that broke and the @Jvm* annotations that fixed them.
Read the postWhy does a token die silently, when should you ask for permission, how do you get from a notification to the right screen? The real work starts after the setup.
Read the postA year after learning Python I built an earthquake early-warning prototype with a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino. Instead of the flat line I expected on screen, I got a jittering cloud of numbers. What that project taught me about GPIO, serial lines, sampling, filtering and power.
Read the postA user hands you a solution; what they are really describing is the problem they ran into. The questions I use to turn a request back into a problem, and how I prioritize from there.
Read the postI have used both on real projects. Where each one shines, where each one hurts, and the 5 questions to ask yourself before you choose.
Read the postAfter six years of writing native apps in Swift, Java and Kotlin, I moved to Flutter. The hard part was not the syntax but the way you build the interface: immutable widgets, a build method that runs over and over, the scope setState covers, and where BuildContext sits in the tree. I go through what confused me in the first month and the mistakes I made, one by one.
Read the postThe most expensive part of a product is the features that get built and never used. The method I have followed since I started seeing scope cutting as a skill rather than a loss.
Read the postThere is not a single JavaScript library on this site. Applying the theme before the first paint, IntersectionObserver, event delegation, and the scroll bug I found in my own code.
Read the postKeeping the data locally is the easy part. The hard part is deciding which side wins when both of them change the same record.
Read the postA mobile app is a program that runs on the user's device and can be picked apart. Only one rule follows from that: nothing coming from the client can be taken as true. Here is what that rule means in practice.
Read the postThe theme system I built while writing this site in plain CSS, the grid overflows I fixed and the contrast corrections I made. No libraries, just real code.
Read the postCore Web Vitals really asks three simple questions: when did the page appear, did it stay in place after it appeared, and did it respond when it was touched. The typical mistakes that break these three metrics, and the concrete fixes I applied on the sites I delivered.
Read the postThe wrong revenue model loses users faster than a bad interface. A comparison of the three models, the ad formats, and three places you should never put an interstitial.
Read the postIn a relational database you normalize the data; in a document database you model the screen. The modeling approach I settled on after paying the price for understanding that difference too late.
Read the postI run the same list on every site I deliver. Steps to handle before you write any content — most take 10 minutes, but skipping them can leave you invisible for months.
Read the postI have been teaching myself since 2018. The three habits that worked, the two methods that never did, and the order I follow when learning a new language.
Read the postSize has a direct effect on your download and update rates. Concrete steps on App Bundle, R8, vector assets and content downloaded on demand.
Read the postA brand voice is not made by a slogan but by the small decisions taken every day. How I put the tone down in writing while running social media for two brands, the platform differences, the recurring formats and the content calendar.
Read the postWhen should you ask for permissions, does sign-up have to be mandatory, what should an empty screen say? Eight concrete steps to keep a freshly downloaded app from being deleted on day one.
Read the postI published my first app at 18 and then pulled it myself — I knew how to build it, but not how to run it. The real constraints of shipping a product while still at school, and the lessons I took from that period.
Read the postThe one minute a user spends the first time they open the app decides more than everything that comes after it. The decisions I made while building the onboarding flow, and the ones I dropped.
Read the postThe TÜBİTAK project I left unfinished, my first app that made money, and what I learned every time I switched languages. Not a straight success story — a list of what worked and what did not.
Read the postI submitted the same app to both app stores; on the surface the processes look alike, in practice they are nothing alike. The differences — from review logic to test distribution, from rejection reasons to the store listing — and how I plan for each one.
Read the postOn the web you can roll back a bad deploy; on mobile you cannot — the version on the user's phone is out of your hands. The release management setup I built around that fact.
Read the postCopy written by a developer usually explains “what it does”, while the user is looking for an answer to “what's in it for me”. The method I used to rewrite the store and interface copy for my own apps, shown through concrete sentences.
Read the postI learned the expensive way that downloads do not arrive on their own once you publish. The steps I take to grow an app.
Read the postThe real problem in content production is not inspiration, it is consistency. The loop I put together when I had to build apps and publish at the same time — an idea pool, a batch shooting day, format templates and a single calendar.
Read the postCompetition in local search works nothing like nationwide search: it comes down to distance, relevance and prominence. Step by step, the setup I build for businesses with a physical address — the profile, NAP consistency, page architecture and the review flow.
Read the postA search engine reads the text on your page but only guesses at “is this a service, a post or a person”. JSON-LD removes exactly that guesswork. Which types I use and why, how I validate them, and the traps I fall into most often.
Read the postThe hard part of freelancing was never the code. Lessons on getting scope approved in writing, delivering bad news early, talking about price, and telling the benefit apart from the feature.
Read the postIf you would like to talk about what I could contribute to your team, drop me a line. My CV and all of my projects are linked below.