Özgeçmiş

Eser Özvataf

Software Consultant · AI-Augmented Workflow Architect · Open Source Steward
via Açık Yazılım — founded 2020, active 2026

I build high-leverage engineering organizations, open source ecosystems, and AI-augmented development workflows. Over nearly three decades of self-directed software practice I have moved from writing my first production systems at fourteen, through multi-tenant SaaS platforms in the pre-cloud era, to running engineering functions at Turkish decacorns and serving as a spokesperson and coordinator for AYA (Açık Yazılım Ağı) that emerged on the first night of the February 2023 earthquakes, a 24,000-volunteer effort whose credit belongs to the community itself and which earned coverage in TIME, WIRED, Google's and Amazon's official channels, and Euronews.

Today I lead Açık Yazılım, a software consultancy focused on three intersecting practices: engineering-organization design (scaling teams from startup to enterprise with performance measurement), AI transition engineering (turning existing software teams into agent-augmented teams without ripping up the Agile muscle they already have), and open source strategy (foundation design, contribution governance, community-as-distribution). I am also the creator of various open source tooling including noskills, an open source state-machine orchestrator for AI coding agents.

I teach and consult in a Socratic mode: I do not sell answers; I accelerate clients' arrival at their own. Engineering practice is grounded in Agility / Jidoka discipline, now being ported into AI-agent pipelines. Bias toward reading source, toward peer/community learning, and toward writing down thinking.

My public footprint is ten years of continuous Turkish-language conference speaking (recorded 42 talks across 10 cities), a YouTube channel of 75 long-form pieces with 120,000+ views and 5,500 subscribers, 340 GitHub repositories totalling 3,300 stars, a consistent decade-long writing presence on Twitter / X and local Discord + Telegram communities serving as the primary real-time distribution layer.

Flagship Initiatives

AYA, Açık Yazılım Ağı (spokesperson & coordinator, 2023 - present)

Türkiye's first software foundation, which emerged the night of the Kahramanmaraş earthquakes (6 February 2023). Scaled from a handful of people in a Twitter thread to 24,000+ registered volunteers, 50+ open source licensed projects, and working interfaces with AFAD, AHBAP, and AKUT within 72 hours. The credit for this work belongs collectively to the volunteer community; my role was to serve as a public voice and coordinator — helping operationalise the CNCF/Apache-Foundation model I had argued for at the Turkish Ministry of Industry in 2020. International and national press coverage includes TIME, WIRED, Euronews, Google's official Türkiye blog, Amazon Disaster Relief, Milliyet, Webtekno, and various sources.

noskills (creator, 2024 - present)

Apache-2.0 state-machine orchestrator for AI coding agents, with first-class support across seven platforms (Claude Code, Kiro, Cursor, Codex, GitHub Copilot, OpenCode, Windsurf). Push vs. pull execution models. Ports the Jidoka / Toyota Production System / Scrum feedback discipline into the AI-agent era. Lives inside eser/stack.

eser/rules (creator, 2023)

Personal AI-agent rule system published on GitHub — predates the Anthropic Skills specification by more than a year. A small but load-bearing primary-source record of independent AI-workflow engineering.

Professional Experience

Founder & CEO — Açık Yazılım Ltd. Şti. (2020 legal, 2026 active)

Founded in 2020 for international contracting; activated in 2026 as a full consulting practice focused on engineering organisations, AI transition engineering, and open source strategy. First consulting client: T-Fashion (ongoing).

Fellow — T-Fashion (May 2025 - Apr 2026)

A focused, embedded form of consulting at the fashion-tech startup. Backend and platform work centred on batch-LLM cost engineering across analytics and inference pipelines — the direct source material for my 2025 talk Scaling Without Bankruptcy. Transitioning to external consulting relationship in 2026.

Head of Engineering — Teknasyon (May 2023 - May 2025)

Owned the engineering function across the product portfolio. With a single React Native engineer, led the build of esim.io, which became the company's second-highest-revenue product — a canonical case of modern stack + minimal team + Agile + DORA discipline producing commercial outcome. DORA + SPACE engineering metrics instrumentation.

CTO — Datapad (Oct 2022 - May 2023)

Datapad is a tech startup enabling a data-driven culture for teams of all sizes, building the world's easiest data solution. Raised $1m in pre-seed, backed by 500 Startups.

DevRel, Engineering Director — Getir (Dec 2021 - Oct 2022)

Getir is a decacorn tech startup that delivers ultra-fast groceries.

Achievements:

The first DevRel of the company, being the founder of the discipline
Led the "Agile Office", organizational agility professionals team of agile coaches and scrum masters
Completed 3 bootcamps, along with 14 new recruitments
Attended some external events
Celebrated May the 4th: Star Wars Day
Started technical event series named Getir Tech Talks
Worked on improvements to hiring processes
Worked on improvements to onboarding processes
Crafted an observation-based career framework for the entire technology department
Introduced an internal mobility policy for those who have long tenure
Crafted a maturity matrix to state common goals for squads in perspective of tech-data-product concerns
Held over 100 face-to-face interviews to collect insights

Coordinator of Projects — Turkish Open Source Platform (Dec 2020 - May 2021)

An establishment under the auspices of the Ministry of Industry and Technology of the Turkish state, Turkey Open Source Platform aims to increase the number of software developers Turkey needs, to increase the qualifications of existing software developers, and to develop the open-source ecosystem. In this respect, the platform performs a similar function to CNCF (CloudNative Foundation) and Linux Foundation.

Achievements:

Established and facilitated weekly meetings of project groups under five different project topics in order to produce the software needed by the public and private sectors in Turkey with open source software (These topics were Natural Language Processing, Cloud and Database Systems, Mobility, Linux (Pardus) and Digital Badges.)
Formed collaborations between platform stakeholders
Planned and kicked off online a webinar series and two hackathons
Designed an architecture and developed project analysis of a digital badge and verification project
Assisted and reviewed technical output related with projects

Software Manager — Setur (Sep 2018 - Nov 2020)

Setur is the tourism and duty-free merchandising company of Koç Holding Group of Companies, which is on the Fortune 500 list.

Achievements:

Accomplished the leadership and coaching of Agile & DevOps transformation which led the company to have 80% accurate estimations
Led 9 cross-functional product teams, with a total of 30+ people with various functions (UX, QA, SE, BA, etc.)
Designed company-wide prioritization flow to maintain both product and technical roadmaps of products
Achieved faster onboarding process and development of culture by initiating a knowledge base that consists of both cultural and technical guidelines
Achieved faster troubleshooting and bug detection by established software quality assurance and delivery metrics with monitoring, tracing, and alerting mechanisms
Transformed Windows & .NET only ecosystem into polyglot-enabled, Linux-containerized, orchestrated and multi-regional infrastructure runs on Kubernetes
Improved IT recruitment processes, implemented technical assessments, attended 300+ recruitment meetings
Enabled remote and multi-regional development culture
Organized a meetup and several training sessions

Technologies, Platforms, and Concepts experienced during the period: JavaScript, .NET, Java, Microsoft Azure, Azure DevOps, Linux, Windows, macOS, Kubernetes, Docker, Postgres, SQL Server, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Node.js, Cypress, Jest, webpack, Kibana, Grafana, React, React Native, Microservices, DDD, CloudNative, OpenSource.

Lead Software Developer — KoçSistem (May 2016 - Sep 2018)

KoçSistem is the information technology company of Koç Holding Group of Companies, which is on the Fortune 500 list. They offer a wide range of products and services in areas such as Internet of Things, Big Data & Analytics, Security, Corporate Cloud, Corporate Mobility, Business Solutions, Digital Workforce and RPA.

Achievements:

Kicked off the company's main application framework and was the first member of the company's DevOps and Software Architecture teams
Developed a React project for initializing codebases that use the company's main application framework with selected components on a web wizard form
Helped other teams to embrace Agile and DevOps practices
Took parts of analysis and decisions of company's product choices (such as CMSes, orchestration tools, etc)
Delivered the company's first serverless project that runs on AWS Lambda
Delivered and maintained 3 enterprise solutions to customers
Attended recruitment meetings as a technical interviewer

Technologies, Platforms, and Concepts experienced during the period: JavaScript, .NET, Amazon Web Services, Jenkins, JMeter, Docker, SQL Server, Oracle, MongoDB, ElasticSearch, Node.js, AWS Lambda, AWS Cognito, AWS S3, React, Redux, FaaS, DDD.

Software Architect — Mobilex (Sep 2015 - Apr 2016)

MobileX is a fast-growing tech company focused on building and marketing highly scalable mobile applications. Despite being such a young company, they have a track record of building & growing mobile apps on various verticals that reached over 120 million users across 160 countries.

Achievements:

Developed a complete backend and cloud architecture for Instagram-like application with location-awareness

Technologies, Platforms, and Concepts experienced during the period: JavaScript, Amazon Web Services, Terraform, Docker, Postgres, MongoDB, Node.js, AWS VPC, AWS EC2, AWS ElasticBeanstalk, AWS S3, OpenStreetMaps.

Active on Twitter / X (@eserozvataf) — a decade of steady, consistent presence built around public technical thinking. The account functions as a content-production channel and a validator base: a meaningful audience built slowly through writing, rather than growth-hacked.
YouTube — "Eser Özvataf | SW³": a body of 75 long-form pieces (30 edited videos + 45 live streams) accumulating 120,000+ total views and 5,500 subscribers. Live streams outperform videos 3× on view-count, reflecting an audience oriented to conversation rather than edited instruction. Top episodes include AI tool reviews, live coding interviews, career coaching and the Backend Golang series.
Telegram communities — after Discord was blocked in Türkiye, Telegram became the primary real-time channel and this segmented infrastructure grew around it, mixing geographic and psychographic segmentation; we currently maintain a network of Telegram channels.
acikkaynak.info / acik-kaynak.org (founded 2015) — the GitHub organisation infrastructure that eight years later became the operational spine of AYA.
Turkish Open Source Platform / Ministry of Industry (2020) — convened Turkcell, Türk Telekom, and other large operators into pre-competitive open source cooperation; argued the foundation-owned-commons model later realised in AYA.
Founder-of-the-founder line: introduced several contributors to the broader ecosystem through long-running mentoring relationships.

GitHub Portfolio

340 repositories · 3,300 stars on own work.

Selected active repositories:

stack (106★) — personal monorepo; houses noskills
aya.is (61★) — AYA's community website codebase
laroux (416★) — JavaScript/React based framework
rules (52★) — AI-agent rule system published before the Anthropic Skills specification
topluluklar (212★) — Index of our telegram network
acikkaynak-arsiv (370★) — Turkish open source index archive
acikkaynak-website (110★) — Turkish open source index web site archive
fetchp (106★) — multi-runtime fetch wrapper (Web / Node / Deno / Bun)
design-patterns (94★) — educational reference
kontra-is-anlasmasi (89★) — employment contract template contributed to the ecosystem
golang-service-template (67★) — production Go service scaffold
vscode-one-dark-pro-monokai-darker (59★) — editor theme

LEAD Execution Program — Personal Branding, Reputation and Perception Management Training for Leaders (Sep 2019) — Koç Holding HR / Koç University
LEAD Execution Program — Customer Experience (Sep 2019) — Koç Holding HR / Koç University
Assessment Center (Aug 2019) — TAG
Applied Entrepreneurship Training (Apr 2016) — KOSGEB
edx CS-169.1x: Software as a Service (Aug 2013) — Berkeley (University of California) — verify
edx 6.00x: Introduction to Computer Science and Programming (Jun 2013) — MIT — verify
Academic Personnel and Graduate Education Exam (May 2012) — ÖSYM
General English (EFL) — Upper-Intermediate (Council of Europe B2) (Jun 2011) — UKLA
Project Management Methodologies and Practices (Jun 2011) — Turkcell Akademi
MCTS — Microsoft Windows Mobile Application Development (May 2010) — Microsoft
MCTS — Microsoft Windows Mobile Designing, Implementing and Managing (May 2010) — Microsoft

Özgeçmiş

Eser Özvataf

Profile

Flagship Initiatives

AYA, Açık Yazılım Ağı (spokesperson & coordinator, 2023 - present)

noskills (creator, 2024 - present)

eser/rules (creator, 2023)

Professional Experience

Founder & CEO — Açık Yazılım Ltd. Şti. (2020 legal, 2026 active)

Fellow — T-Fashion (May 2025 - Apr 2026)

Head of Engineering — Teknasyon (May 2023 - May 2025)

CTO — Datapad (Oct 2022 - May 2023)

DevRel, Engineering Director — Getir (Dec 2021 - Oct 2022)

Coordinator of Projects — Turkish Open Source Platform (Dec 2020 - May 2021)

Software Manager — Setur (Sep 2018 - Nov 2020)

Lead Software Developer — KoçSistem (May 2016 - Sep 2018)

Software Architect — Mobilex (Sep 2015 - Apr 2016)

E-Commerce Software Consultant — Zaimoglu Holding (Sep 2014 - Aug 2015)

Team Lead — Goldsoft Trading (Jun 2012 - Aug 2013)

Head of Software Development — CMFNet (Jun 2008 - May 2012)

Software Design Engineer — DevBiz (Apr 2006 - Jan 2007)

Backend Developer and System Administrator — Ispro (Mar 2005 - Apr 2006)

Web Developer — Egebilgi (Jun 2004 - Feb 2005)

Webmaster — Sis Hosting (Jan 2001 - Aug 2002)

Speaking Engagements

Community Leadership

GitHub Portfolio

Education

Master's Degree — Information and Communication Technologies in Education (2013 - 2019)

Bachelor of Science — Information Technology (2010 - 2012)

Associate's Degree — Computer Programming (2002 - 2004)

Certificates and Exams