About Me

Hello, this is Utku (ootkoo). I'm a polyglot developer. I've been a tech-lead / backend architect for the most of my career. Since 2015 my main area of interest has been JavaScript - leading me into UI development too – which makes me a well rounded full-stack developer productive at both high and low levels of system design with a product focus.

I've been around. I love building things. I've built startups, grown teams, worked at enterprises, did a fair amount of contract/freelance work.

My main area of expertise lies in JavaScript/Typescript/Node, Python, and JVM ecosystems on Unixy platforms with strong devops skills. In a previous life I did desktop and games development via Delphi/C++. Language-wise i'd love to go back to my roots - systems developer with low level languages like Rust OR doing the opposite and going higher level like platforms like Clojure. I'm kinda sick of the in-between languages listed above but I found JS/TS to be the perfect all-around platform in recent years and stuck there; practicality & ecosystem wins.

I have managed small to mid size teams before; however these days I refrain from management roles - unless it's a hands-on one - I do not enjoy it as much as coding and I’d like to go deeper on my favorite topics: modern UI technologies like React/Solid.js, modern DB technologies (especially column-oriented/OLAP), distributed computing, and simplifying app development via bridging the UI layers with DB layers in novel ways like GraphQL (not very novel these days though, isn' it :)).