Who Am I?

My first real interaction with technology began in 2012 with a Nokia C6-01. At the time, I was mainly downloading cracked games for the Symbian operating system. That curiosity soon evolved. In 2013, after my Huawei Ascend P6 became slow and almost unusable, I discovered the concept of custom ROMs. I started flashing different ROMs, rooting the phone, and using the advantages of root access to crack apps. I even tried to tweak the CyanogenMod ROM myself, although I couldn’t fully pull it off. Around the same time, I began using rooted devices to access Wi-Fi networks in cafés and similar places by cracking passwords.

While doing all this, I found myself questioning how phones actually work. In 2014, I had already taken apart my new Samsung Galaxy S4 into what felt like a thousand pieces—antenna cables in one corner, motherboard in another—just to study its internals. I damaged it a couple of times, but luckily it was a sturdy device and kept working. When I searched how applications are built, I came across a simple online C editor, and the first thing I saw was #include <stdio.h>. After watching basic tutorials like “how to code” or “simple programming examples,” I tried something like int x = 5 and printed it using printf. The moment I saw it displayed, I was fascinated.

I kept looking around, exploring coding videos and tutorials, even though I didn’t fully understand everything. It had started to interest me more and more, but I still wasn’t sure if I wanted to become a developer or study computer engineering.

When it came time to choose a university program, I leaned toward engineering. I selected fields like electrical-electronics, civil, mechanical, and computer engineering. Computer engineering was among my top choices, but I wasn’t fully committed to the idea. I didn’t want to spend another year preparing for exams, so I went with my existing list. Eventually, I was placed in the Civil Engineering program at Akdeniz University.

That’s where the real shift happened. I was sharing a dorm room with two computer engineering students—one in their second year and the other in their first. I was especially drawn to the second-year student typing code in that black terminal window. After some time, I realized I wanted to switch paths and study computer engineering instead.

It wasn’t an easy process—lots of paperwork, announcements, and formal steps—but by the end of summer 2020, I had officially transferred to the Computer Engineering department at Süleyman Demirel University. And just like that, what started with a simple thought—"let's learn a bit of Python"—ended up taking me places I never quite expected.