Ekin Öcalan

WORK HISTORY

EDUCATION

ABOUT EKIN ÖCALAN

Here is my journey becoming a professional:I fell in love with the web the first time I saw what I could accomplish with it at the age of 11. I prepared my first web page writing pure HTML on Notepad.When I was 14, I learned about PHP and started altering the core of back-then-very-popular phpBB forum software and PHP-Nuke CMS. Unfortunately, I had poor English skills back then, so I coded my own CMS and used it for my web pages.When I sorted things out at the age of 15, I made my first open-source contributions to phpBB by implementing several modifications.At age 16, I created an MMORPG for Harry Potter, which eventually attracted more than players. The same year, I came 2nd in the Turkish National Computer Olympics in my region.I enrolled in the Computer Science degree at one of Turkey\'s top 3 universities at the age of 18 and immediately started working part-time for different companies. Since then, I have made my living by coding, failing, learning, executing, teaching, and coding again.My full-time career started about ten years ago. I co-founded and eventually sold a company; I worked remotely for years before it was cool and moved to Berlin to help scale Delivery Hero\'s QCommerce business. I worked as a software engineer at Delivery Hero, where I was also an internal trainer facilitating productivity, prioritization, stress, and time management sessions.Then I moved to Shopify to work on some very complex technical problems. Building Starter Plan, bringing generative AI to the online store editor, actively mentoring junior to mid-level engineers, monthly Dev ATC duties to make sure Shopify is stable and shipping were some of the highlights of my time at Shopify.I publish articles on software engineering at my blog https://ekinocalan.com/dev/. You can also find my weekly gems on sustainable productivity at https://ekin.substack.com.