Career
Where Do You Draw the Overengineering Line in Small Projects?
The decisions, trade-offs and experiences I rely on to avoid overengineering traps in my own indie projects.
Career
217 posts
Career development, work life, leadership and professional growth experiences.
Career
Diving Into 7 Projects at Once: Why Not To, and Why I Did It Anyway
The chaos of running multiple side projects at the same time, and the story of pushing through anyway after learning from the mess.
Career
Listing Price and Real Rent Are Not the Same: The Reality of Data…
Why scraped listing data doesn't reflect the real market, plus the technical challenges of data cleaning — from my own experience.
Career
✍️ Hand-written
A Self-Running Content System: An Indie Hacker's Experience
Problems I hit, lessons I learned, and the small tweaks behind my AI-driven content pipeline. From VPS to GitHub Actions, real field experience.
Career
Why There's No Real Salary Data in Turkey
Examining how hard it is to get salary data in Turkey, in light of my personal observations and data experience.
Career
The Idempotency Crisis in Distributed Systems: An Operational…
Explore — through Mustafa Erbay's lens — the idempotency concept and the crisis that turns into an operational nightmare in the complexity of distributed…
Career
The Lasting Cost of Quick Fixes: An Architect's Regret
An in-depth guide to the long-term costs of emergency fixes and an architect's experiences on the topic.
Career
The Mysterious Effect of Clock Drift in Distributed Systems
Learn the causes, effects of clock drift in distributed systems and the methods used to solve it through a detailed examination.
Career
Hidden Sentinel Wars in Production: A Firewall Betrayal
Dig deep into the unexpected effects of Sentinel-based firewalls in production and these 'hidden wars.' Strategies and solutions.
Career
The Disaster a Single DNS Record Can Create
Discover the critical importance of DNS and how a single wrong record can lead to massive disasters. How to manage these risks in your career and operations...
Career
IAM Role Mess: The Cloud Identity Management Swamp
Discover the causes and risks of IAM role mess in cloud environments and the ways out of this swamp. Best practices for a secure cloud infrastructure...
Career
The Battle Against Technical Debt: An Engineer's Diplomacy
Tackling technical debt is not just about writing code, but also about diplomatic communication with stakeholders. Discover an engineer's role in this process.
Career
✍️ Hand-written
My Cleanup Script Killed the GitHub Runner: A Self-Inflicted Incident
My disk-cleanup.timer wiped the runner's _work/_temp directories. For 16 hours every cron exploded with 'Missing file: set_output_*'. A confession of…
Career
Cross-Team Tension During a Crisis: An Incident Story
Explore the causes and consequences of cross-team tension during a critical incident, and the steps needed to manage it. Effective leadership…
Career
The Paralysis of Architectural Debt: A Project's Silent Death
A deep dive into the destructive effects of architectural (technical) debt that we encounter so often in software projects, and how a project gets dragged…
Career
The Curse of Stale Cache in High-Traffic Applications: Strategies and…
Learn how stale data hurts performance in high-traffic applications and the ways to break out from under that curse.
Career
✍️ Hand-written
An Old Engineer's Notebook: The Automation Nightmare
In a world where we keep pushing the limits of automation, what is the cost of losing the human factor? Technology and the future from an old engineer's…
Career
The Failover Paradox: Bringing Down a System While Trying to Save It
Learn how you can unintentionally take your systems down while trying to save them, and how to avoid the Failover Paradox.
Career
The Dark Side of Technology: The Unscalable API Gateway Wars
An in-depth guide to API gateway scaling problems, the complexity of system architecture, and how these wars affect your career.
Career
State Management in the Cloud: An SRE's Lost Battles
Explore the challenges of state management in cloud environments and the battles fought in this space, told from an SRE's perspective.
Career
The Legacy of an Old Internal Load Balancer: An Engineer's Test
An old internal load balancer fails unexpectedly — and shapes the technical and career-defining test it puts an engineer through.
Career
From Monolith to Microservices: The DevOps Culture Wars
Migrating from monolithic architecture to microservices isn't just a technical transformation — it's a deep cultural shift. Through DevOps principles, in…
Career
The Hidden Trap of Auto-Scaling: A Capacity Engineer's…
Learn about the unexpected challenges of auto-scaling and how, as a capacity engineer, you can avoid these traps.
Career
The Zombie Process Hunt in Production: Anatomy of a Hidden…
A detailed look at the 'zombie process' problem in production environments and how to analyze and resolve this hidden form of resource waste.