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Hi, I'm Sedat! I've been writing programs since I was 9 years old. I'm a self-taught programmer who later worked at Microsoft Windows Core OS Division as a Software Engineer. My LinkedIn profile has more details.

• 📙I've written Street Coder, a book that teaches unconventional perspectives to beginner/mid-level programmers.
• I blog mostly about programming at ssg.dev.

I use GitHub mostly as a sandbox to play as well as an archive for my old projects, but I have a couple of hobby open source projects that are slightly more popular:

• SimpleBase: BaseXxx encoder/decoder library for .NET. It's used in projects like Net-dns and Ipfs.Core.
• HashDepot: Implementation of unconventional hash functions for .NET. It's used in Unity3D DOTS and Apache Pulsar.
• TurkishId: Turkish citizenship ID number validator for .NET.

I started writing programs on a borrowed Sinclair ZX Spectrum+. My parents later bought me an Amstrad CPC464 on which I taught myself BASIC and Z80 Assembly. I switched to PC by working on a IBM PS/2 Model 30 286 secretly in the computing department of Anadolu University while still studying high school. I learned Turbo Pascal and OOP during that time. I failed university entrance exams, and started working professionally at a software company immediatey after my high school graduation.

• I developed many shareware and commercial applications in the 90's. In fact, PC World Magazine in Turkey released a Floppy Disk called "Alaturka '96 - Top 10 Turkish Shareware" in 1996, and six of the software included were written by me.
• I won 1st place award in Altin Disket (Golden Floppy Disk) '94 competition organized by Microsoft and PC World Magazine with my file manager called "Baston" that resembled Windows Explorer before it was a thing.
• I got 3rd place among 38 teams by myself in Middle East Technical University Programming Contest in the 90's. I was studying Economics at the time, so that was the only time an Economics student got a high ranking in such a contest.
• I wrote one of the earliest e-commerce applications in Turkey called CyberShop in 1995 for BBS systems that allowed SysOps to sell merchandise and users to sell their own stuff.
• I have so many failed projects that one of my talks that I recount my failures takes more than an hour. A partial Turkish transcript can be found here.
• I also wrote one of the earliest incantations of a "Facebook-like" service in the 90's called "HiTBase" that let you find other people based on criteria you gave to connect with them.
• My friends and I formed a demogroup called Arteffect in 1997. We released a musicdisk called Heretical, and a couple other small stuff.
• I wrote one of the earliest e-commerce applications that used AJAX (it wasn't even named at the time) by utilizing XMLHttpRequest to show dynamic content orchestrated with the server in 2000 or so.
• I wrote multiplayer door games for BBS systems called "Yogurt" and "Bitmeyen Savaş" ("Neverending War").
• I once wrote code on a Data General Nova mainframe using only physical latches to set bits and advance memory registers for a CAT scanner residing in a warehouse in Giresun, Türkiye.
• I started writing my own operating system in the 90's but quickly gave up after finishing the bootloader.
• I developed one of the earliest instances of a social platform called Ekşi Sözlük in 1999. It has since been one of the most popular web sites visited in Turkey, and the most popular Turkish social platform to date. It's been getting 30+M of unique visitors every month and has been seen as "the bastion of free speech in Turkey."
• I wrote an infinite maze generator in 12 bytes on an Amstrad CPC464 as a homage to both the machine itself and the book "10 PRINT CHR$ (205.5 + RND (1)); : GOTO 10".
• I won a 128-byte intro competition at one of 7DX demoscene parties because I was the only entrant for that category :).
• I love watching anime. I was so inspired by Neon Genesis Evangelion that I wrote a network monitoring tool called Melchior that was inspired by the looks of the series.
• I designed and developed a fault-tolerant, realtime-compressing data transfer protocol for Turkish Directorate of Meteorology in 1995 because the rural stations at the time had flaky connections.
• Because my friends and I didn't have money to license Shockwave Multi User Server, I reverse engineered the protocol and wrote my own SMUS called FUBS (Ftuffball Server, named after my friend Detay's game project). Some of its pieces can be found here.
• I started writing many different flavors of Nortom Commander clones on both DOS and Windows: Coke Commander, Pitikare Commander, SoC, and definitely more. I usually set out to employ interesting paradigms, like parallel processing and whatnot but got bored quickly. The sources for SoC are here.
• Despite the existence of many popular variants, I wrote my own Matrix screensaver when the first batch of sequels came out in 2003. It was quite popular in Turkey, so I open sourced it.
• I appear in the books The Routledge Companion to Global Internet Histories, Made With by John Grant, and Twitter and Tear Gas by Zeynep Tufekci.
• My book Street Coder got translated to Korean, Russian, Chinese, and Turkish!