I'm Umur_
Principal Software Engineer.
Builder.
I have spent 15+ years building backend systems across enterprise, government, and high-growth environments. I write code, design architectures, and ship products. I stay close to the codebase, especially where performance and correctness matter most. Based in New York City.
Education & Work
A long path from computer engineering school to enterprise platforms, government systems, and high-growth startups.
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Master's - Computer Science
MIU
Iowa, USA
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Bachelor's - Computer Engineering
TOBB ETU
Ankara, Turkey
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Now
Vice President / Lead Software Engineer
Backend systems, platform & architecture
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Past
Senior Architect, Team Leader
Enterprise systems, mobile, full-stack engineering
What I Do
Backend engineering, distributed systems, and the unglamorous work of making things actually run in production.
Spring Boot microservices, REST and GraphQL APIs, event-driven workflows, layered caching, and observability-first design that holds up under load.
End-to-end architecture: data models, service boundaries, message flows, and deployment topology. The decisions you cannot easily undo, made deliberately.
Aligning technical decisions across teams, setting architectural direction, and mentoring engineers without abandoning the keyboard myself.
Deep code reviews on critical paths, architecture deep-dives, and walking junior engineers through the why behind production-ready decisions.
Latest Blog Posts
Notes from production: backend, databases, distributed systems, and the failure modes nobody warned you about.
The Monolith That Works Fine, Thanks
Monoliths aren't a sign of technical immaturity. Most teams don't need microservices. Here's why a well-structured monolith is often the smarter choice.
Read the post →Jun
5
2026
FrontendThe SPA Was a Twenty-Year Detour
The SPA rebuilt routing, templating, and caching in JavaScript, then bolted SEO back on. Where it genuinely won, where it never needed to, and the swing back.
Jun
4
2026
BackendYour Internal APIs Shouldn't Be REST
REST is a choice you make for outsiders. Between your own services an untyped text protocol is a liability: payload bloat, no schema, breakage at runtime.
Jun
3
2026
DatabasePostgres Won the Database War. Now What?
Postgres passed MySQL on the Stack Overflow survey. 'Postgres for everything' became the default. Where that gravity helps, where it quietly stops, and my rule.
Jun
2
2026
BackendYou're Running Kafka for Three Topics
Kafka is a commit log for high-throughput streaming. Three topics at 10 msg/sec is not that. The operational tax you didn't price, and the tool that fits.
Jun
1
2026
BackendREST vs GraphQL Is Over. You're Now Running Both, Badly.
REST vs GraphQL got declared a tie: use both. Nobody costs that out. Two contracts, the HTTP caching you lost, a leaky BFF, and the N+1 that just moved.
Get In Touch
Always happy to talk about backend systems, distributed architecture, or interesting problems. Reach out.