Utkan Sevimli

My first website was hand-written HTML, typed in Notepad and uploaded to the free 10 MB of hosting cjb.net gave away back then.

I wrote Pascal, spent hours on cybersecurity forums trying to learn whatever I could, picked up the guitar, and sat in on the senior classes’ lab lessons of my own accord, helping the older students along the way — the earliest training of my R&D instincts and hands-on skills, under my lab teacher Oğuz Kaan Bozkuş.

I was an evening-programme student, but my days started early in the lab: as assistant to our department coordinator, Uğur Kesen, and the person responsible for the department’s laboratory, I set up the labs and supported the instructors teaching there. This is also where I learned assembly.

The guitar pulled me into recording technology. In parallel with university — sometimes at the expense of my evening classes — I worked at a music studio in Kadıköy. I helped musicians through both kinds of sessions: multitrack recordings, with a microphone on every instrument, and live takes of the whole band captured by microphones set up in the middle of the room. I also repaired the studio’s gear.

Until then I had lived by Serdar Öztop’s line, “digital should have its limits.” Then a digital processor landed on my bench that simply sounded good — and I realized it was time to leave that line behind and focus on software.

After the studio I turned to Linux and set out to learn it on my own. It started with a Pardus 2011 DVD, mailed out for the price of shipping — the beginning of my focus on Linux. From there I joined online communities, asked questions and dug through everything I could find. That search is what led me to Hackerspace Istanbul.

A two-way exchange. The community deepened my Linux and took the security I had picked up on forums much further; in return I helped with PCB design and with improving their hackathon projects. I attended their trainings and later took on roles in running them.

My degree years were lab years. Rather than go home and come back early for lab work before classes, I often just stayed in the lab. At night, to keep busy, I sat in on master’s courses and helped the lecturers run the hands-on sessions of their big data and Linux classes for graduate students. Another lab, another reason to stay.

The first lab I helped found, funded by Bahçeşehir University. Sparkgo gave student science and technology projects a stage the school could proudly show — and taught me how to tell the story of technical work.

Next came BAU Future Lab, funded with Intel’s support — and this was the hands-on one. We built real IoT projects on embedded boards, sensors and Linux, and learned what it takes to make connected devices work outside a demo.