About
I'm running an experiment on myself.
Hello. I'm Murat. I was born in Mersin in 1971. I graduated from METU (ODTÜ), Department of Statistics, in 1995. For more than ten years I worked in the IT department of a national bank, as a technical specialist and then a manager. Afterwards, with the support of the Ministry of Industry, I founded my own company and spent close to twenty years at Mersin Technopark building ERP applications specific to the logistics sector.
From logistics to e-commerce
Last year I stopped serving the logistics sector and decided to step into e-commerce — something I'd had in mind for a long time but never quite dared to do.
My daughter had a big part in this decision. When she finished her Health Management degree and joined the caravan of "naturally unemployed graduates", I found myself thinking, "what can I do for her?" — and remembered the natural soaps, candles and ceramics she made as a hobby and handed out to everyone around her. The time had come to take that long-postponed step. So I asked the logistics sector — which I'd grown thoroughly tired of anyway — for leave, and moved into a new field.
We opened our store under the Rivea Beauty brand and got to work. The process hasn't been easy, but overall I'm happy with how it's going; I even have my "I wish I'd started sooner" moments.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail
But over this past year I didn't only do e-commerce; I also set out to build the technical infrastructure to solve the problems I ran into. They say an old habit dies hard; wherever I look, I end up thinking about how to automate it. Just like someone holding a hammer who sees everything as a nail.
I found that the biggest headache in e-commerce is managing the work between the marketplaces and your own store. We have relatively few products; but if you want to run a campaign, you have to do it separately on Trendyol, on Hepsiburada, on Shopify — on every single one. It's death. A maddening process, especially for an automation junkie like me.
"Let me enter my products once, in a single place — with their images, their documents, their prices — and update them across all my stores with a single command," I thought. As the saying goes, whatever is on a devotee's mind is on his tongue; I'd started writing the app while I was still just thinking about it. A few days later I managed to sync my two stores, and the program went live.
Then financial tracking began to wear me out. While income and expenses had only a few line items I hadn't minded, but after a while I realised it was eating up a lot of my time. And what does a developer do when he notices that? He sits down and pours what's in his head into his program. So I added the financial leg. Then stock became a problem; I wrote the warehouse and stock tracking. In the end, out came an interesting e-commerce management app I named MyProductPassport.
27 years
The other day, when a young developer friend asked, it hit me: I've completed my 27th year in IT. At university we worked on dummy terminals; I met my first computer with a hard disk a month before graduating — its disk was around 20 MB. Before that, floppies in hand, we'd first load simple programs into the computer's memory, then try to run the BASIC, COBOL or FORTRAN code we'd written from another floppy. We'd burn hours just to do that much.
Now AI has entered our lives and I get it to do almost all of my work. The change is mind-boggling — honestly, I can't wrap my head around it either. We live in a time where something you learn today is already obsolete tomorrow, replaced by something new.
So what should one do?
This is exactly where my mind gets tangled. I spent thirty years steering technology in my own small world; and now I can't keep up with it, and I feel like I'm losing the race.
Then I start thinking another way: do I have to be one of the runners in this race? To move forward on a still river, I had to row. But now there's a current, and I can't cope with it. What should I do?
Right now I'm thinking about putting down the oars, leaning back, and enjoying the view. With this site, I'm recording the process of learning to do exactly that. Will I manage it? We'll see — together.
If you'd like to look at my career site too, here it is: saydan.net. You might even find some free, handy tools and apps in there that come in useful — you never know.