HEY, I'M ALPER.

Started with Turbo Pascal and later explored Free Pascal to create a simple graphics engine for RTS games.

I discovered Fasttracker II and started making music. I was fascinated by the tracker interface and the ability to create complex compositions with simple sounds.

Started learning Delphi at school. First time building real GUI's.

At home I broke DOS and Windows every other week just to learn how operating systems worked.

At 16 I found my love for web development: HTML and CSS. There was no internet at home, so I had use the PC in the school library.

I learned from SELFHTML and copied the pages onto floppies to continue at home.

Learning JavaScript was a revelation. I could make web pages interactive and dynamic. It was a whole new world.

I got the keys to the PC room at school. So I did what any responsible person would do: we played CS and StarCraft in the afternoons. My parents were proud I was staying late because they thought I was learning.

After finishing school, I was finally allowed to get internet at home. Mind. Blown.

I was admin in a bulletin board for my friends. We also talked on IRC and later ICQ.

We met frequently at LAN parties. First experiences with networking technology.

Oh, and I started studying computer science.

I started learning Java in university. Never really liked it.

I got hired at a local photography studio. I was responsible for their website, internal tooling and online shop.

This was my very first job as a web developer. I learned a lot about real life requirements.

A landed a second gig at a local photography studio. I was responsible for their website, internal tooling and online shop.

Both jobs were part time, so I could still study while earning enough money to pay for rent.

Five students, creating their own web agency to build custom solutions.

We built individual webapps and internal tools for customers across the automotive, finance and health sectors.

Some uni courses forced me to learn Assembly and Haskell.

I was surprisingly enjoying both of them, because it let me understand the inner workings of computers and programming languages better.

Only two of us were left and we didn't have lots of motivation to keep growing.

I joined a startup as a frontend engineer to build an energy management Webapp.

If you never heard of Qooxdoo before, neither did I. Wasn't as bad as it sounds.

Startup got bought by Cisco and I learned a lot about corporate life.

Started my own startup, building a platform for connecting communities.

The meta-community. No, not like Reddit.

We built like crazy. I learned so much during this time.

Every other week a new JS framework was released. I tried them all.

Reading docs became a hobby.

I learned how Types made everything easier and harder at the same time.

Joined a new company that created wind/solar energy forecasts and did performance optimizations for charts with 1M data points at 60fps.

New job at a company building dynamic ads for Social Media.

Dynamic Sports Videos for Programmatic & Social.

Transition from an engineer to a technical leadership role.

I built GoodWatch in two weeks and launched it to the public.

I learned to love self-hosting and building my own infrastructure.

My first attempt at open source and it's still alive.

Meanwhile at work: the need for robust data processing.

Goodwatch is now processing millions of streaming and movie data. I learned a lot about data pipelines.

Started to try new languages and frameworks, while improving my monitoring stack.

When I spin up a new web apps, I usually build them with Tanstack Start, Tailwind and Convex.

The art of crafting an elegant solution to a complex problem just makes me happy. A good session is when I'm fully locked in and ship a new version at the end.