melik@london:~$ cat about.md
About
Career
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2022 – now
Elsevier Principal Software Engineer
I work on the identity team, building the identity and access management platform behind Elsevier's products: the APIs and services that manage organisations, users and their access, on top of Keycloak, Kong and OpenID Connect. Lately I spend more and more of my time on AI-assisted engineering, getting coding agents to do real, reviewed work.
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2017 – 2022
Cisco Senior Software Engineer
Almost five years on Cisco Umbrella, the cloud security platform. I led the backend of its public status portal, which reports the health of Umbrella's security services in regions around the world, then helped build a new cloud-first data loss prevention service: its policy configuration, scanning and reporting.
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2015 – 2017
News UK Software Engineer
On the customer management team, moving subscriptions and payments onto microservices built with Java and Spring Boot.
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2011 – 2015
London Senior Java Developer
Moved to London in 2011. A government tax administration platform at Crown Agents, then a second-screen entertainment app at Cinime.
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2007 – 2011
Istanbul Java Developer
Where I started: Java systems for banks, insurers and manufacturers.
I studied computer science at Bilkent University and software engineering at Boğaziçi University, and I'm now finishing a master's-level apprenticeship in AI and data science with Cambridge Spark.
Outside work I build things for myself, mostly in Python, Rust, Kotlin and TypeScript, and a lot of it runs on a Raspberry Pi on my desk.
Work projects
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Elsevier · Java · Keycloak · Kong
Identity and access management
The APIs and microservices that manage organisations, users and their access across Elsevier's products, with search powered by OpenSearch. In front of them, Kong API Gateway with OpenID Connect and claims-based authorisation, and Keycloak roles and clients managed as code with Terraform.
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Elsevier · Java · Spring Boot
Scientific data API platform
Moved a set of data services onto one API platform with scientific search, then got it ready for production: structured logging, a standard error contract, automated releases and API-spec linting in CI.
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Elsevier · AI coding agents
AI-assisted delivery
Agent skills and multi-agent review workflows that take work from written requirements to specs, service code and reviewed changes.
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Cisco · 2017 – 2020
Umbrella status portal
Led the backend of the public portal that reports the health of Cisco Umbrella's security services in regions around the world.
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Cambridge Spark · Level 7 · Python · scikit-learn
Machine learning apprenticeship
A master's-level apprenticeship in data science and machine learning, done alongside my job and now at the final assessment. My project used machine learning on login activity to flag accounts that may have been compromised. An unsupervised ensemble came first, and a simple rule-based baseline beat it. Supervised models came next, and there gradient boosting clearly beat the rules.
Side projects
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Rust · TypeScript
Languages and tools
A programming language designed for LLMs to write, a desktop API workbench, and small utilities that scratch an itch.
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Raspberry Pi · Docker
A home lab
My own Git server, VPN and ad-blocking DNS, local language models, and a dashboard that keeps an eye on all of it.
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Python · Data
Markets and data
Trading tools, market dashboards and AI-assisted readings of company filings.
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Kotlin · Godot
Apps and games
Android apps for health, learning and news, and neon arcade games made with Godot.