hello.

grew up in basel. my family is originally from the dersim region — zazaki is the language spoken there. at home i grew up speaking turkish, not zazaki, unfortunately — which is part of why keeping it alive matters to me.

studied wirtschaftswissenschaften at the university of basel, then spent most of my twenties in startup land — first a co-founded venture, then a small software shop building for swiss SMEs for about seven years. that's where i learned to code: it started as a necessity and turned into the part of the work i actually loved.

eventually wanted a change of rhythm — less self-employment, more "what does a real organisation look like from inside." back to basel for a master's in business & technology (blockchain, ai & optimisation, databases — a lot of hard problems), graduated in the top ten of the program, then joined a corporate trainee programme. landed in coop's ai / ml analytics team. still here, still enjoying it more than i expected.

the small saas on the side never stopped — mostly built with kaan sentürk. language-islands.com (web, ios, android) and therapiebericht.ch fall in that bucket. zazaki-islands.com is the outlier: a non-profit i run on my own, to keep an endangered language alive by giving its native speakers a place to translate, record, and pass it down.