This page is intended to provide some background and details for couple of projects I was involved with during my professional career. I think these projects, among many others, helped me shape my software development skills.
If you want to see all the projects I was involved with please visit my LinkedIn profile
“Türkçe Git 101” is an open and freely available Git book written in Turkish. This book is also available in a printed form as “Git ile Versiyon Kontrolü”.
The book is freely available online on GitBook, exercises for the topics covered in the book are also available online
PragmaSQL is a T-SQL editor which I’ve started developing during summer of 2005. The initial name was InfoSQL which was developed with Delphi 6. In 2007 I’ve ported InfoSQL to .NET and renamed the project as PragmaSQL. By the end of 2007 I’ve implemented tons of features and I published PragmaSQL as a commercial product.
After maintaining PragmaSQL as a commercial product more than for two years I’ve decided to open source the code. PragmaSQL is now at version 3 and is still open source and maintained. PragmaSQL got The Code Project’s Members Choice Award in General Database Tools category in 2009 and 2010
Bilgi University Software Development Team still uses PragmaSQL as the main T-SQL editor which provides object history tracking and other great features.
Tools and Technologies
TaksiTV started around 2009 and it was one of the greates projects I was involved with. The project started with the vision to bring credit card payment, advertisements and route display to all cabs in İstanbul/Turkey. The device used on cabs was a series 9000 MDT which was running WindowsCE and had GPS and 3G capabilities. Communication to the device was possible over a custom TCP protocol which was handled by a pre installed C++ application by MobileKnowledge.
I’ve developed a web content management and distribution system, couple of intelligent map extraction tools for this project.
TaksiTV was deployed to couple of cabs for testing. Test setup was successfull and the company was hunting for investors to organize the operations and other business stuff. However, due to some financial issues the project was cancelled after 1 year of development and testing by the company.
Tools and Technologies
eXpressOto is a vehicle repair services and management application developed for İSBAK which is a public company partially owned by İstanbul Municipality.
eXpressOto was the first application I’ve developed with Microsoft Entity Framework as Object Relational Mapper. The ORM things was not new to me because I’ve developed number web applications with NHibernate (starting from version 0.5 as far as I can remember), LLBLGen Pro and SubSonic. But with eXpressOto I had the chance to explore all those great things offered by EF (I admit EF was hard than enough to work with at that time).
eXpressOto is still in active use and runs the whole repair services process that result in multi million dollar transactions annually.
Tools and Technologies
When I got my first iPod in 2009 I was enlightened with the fact that I could develop apps for this magical device and as a bonus the app would work on the relatively new but yet very popular smart phone called iPhone. I discussed the idea with couple of fellow developers and we decided to create a mobile app for Jira.
I’ve been a Jira user for more than 10 years and I’ve already developed a PragmaSQL addin for Jira. I was familiar with SOAP Api so that would be a piece of cake for me and the team to create a mobile app. We purchased a used MacBook and started developing the app with the first version of MonoTouch. It has been a tough journey with lots of unknowns and new things. Platform was new, development tools were new and the team was new. The only knowns were Jira and the C# language. By the end of February in 2010 we published the first version of JiraTouch on Apple AppStore with 9.90$ price tag. JiraTouch was the first mobile app for Jira with extensive support for workflows, custom fields, file uploads, comments and bunch of other features.
JiraTouch got thousands of downloads and was mintained by PragmaTouch team until 2013.
Tools and Technologies
After shipping JiraTouch in 3 months and gaining enough experience on mobile application development and MonoTouch we decided to focus on our next big mobile thing. We had couple of brain storming session with the PragmaTouch team and evaluated some ideas for a while. During the evaluation period we have developed couple of business apps and basic games and published them on Apple AppStore. But these free and basic apps had little chance to suceed in terms of number of downloads and generate revenue so that we can continue the PragmaTouch business.
Team members of PragmaTouch were all employed by Bilgi University and Bilgi was using Moodle, an open source Learning Management System to deliver some online courses. We were all familiar with Moodle and Moodle did not have any mobile application yet. So we decided to create an iPhone app for Moodle. We organized the team so that one member would develop the UI, one would work on the core part of the application and one would manage the project and all other boring advertising and commericial stuff including customer support. But before we started the coding the Core developer had to jump to another project so I was the one to handle all parts other than the UI.
Initial version of MoodleTouch Core was protoyped in 2 weeks. The main diffuculty during this process was the internals of Moodle. Moodle had no SOAP or REST api (current versions have a very limited API) so we had to scrape HTML and manage authentication through cookies. The HTML produced by Moodle was horrible, most of the Core code was developed to extract and organize the HTML as meaningfull chunks of information, the rest was for automating the user interaction (something like a browser with macros).
The first version of mTouch for iPhone was released on April 4 in 2010, that was after 1 month of JiraTouch release. We published mTouch as a paid app with 2.99$ price tag. mTouch received too much attention from the Moodle community, some people liked the app yet some people criticized us for developing a paid app for an open source and free system like Moodle. After the initial release we delivered new versions continuosly based on customer feedback.
During the summer of 2010 we focused our efforts on an iPad version of mTouch named mTouch+. We developed an iPad optimized UI which was using the same Core as mTouch. mTouch+ was released by the end of September in 2010. Short after this release Moodle announced version 2.0 on November 2010 which introduced fundamental and breaking changes for our apps. We started to work on compatibility issues and within couple of weeks we released Moodle 2.0 compatible versions of our apps.
During 2011 we developed and released two more Moodle apps, moodlEZ for iPads and mTouch-U for browsers. 2011 was a very productive year for PragmaTouch team.
MoodleTouch was the first mobile Moodle app. We had couple of competitors, including MoodleHQ, but these efforts did not last too long. Today MoodleTouch is the best and most functional native iOS app for Moodle with support for all standard Moodle modules and does not require any server side installation or tweaking. Students or teachers can begin using MoodleTouch right away.
Tools and Technologies
My role in this project was to develop the Core, manage the project and handle all commercial stuff including customer support and white labeling agreements.
mTouch, mTouch+, moodlEZ and mTouch-U are all in production and used by thousands of students and teachers around the globe. These apps are actively maintained by PragmaTouch and new versions are published regularly. These apps were also white labeled to universities, k12 schools and other educational instututions around the world.
SUGES is a DCU and RTU data collection and control system. Me and my team at PragmaTouch developed SUGES for a natural gas and electricity distribution company located in Turkey. The main purpose of the system is to collect and display sensor data from DCU and RTU devices and manage the devices installed on the field. SUGES was designed and implemented with horizontal scalability in mind.
SUGES is still in production and is used by the company to monitor and manage the natural gas collectors.
Tools and Technologies
VoltPMS is power plant monitoring system developed for VOLT, a leading IT service provider for energy industry. VoltPMS project was completed in 4 months including design and implementation. We developed a high volume data storage model, a web application with management and analytics capabilities, web services and multiplatform mobile applications
VoltPMS mobile app screenshots
VoltPMS is installed and maintained by VOLT and is actively used by VOLT customers.
Tools and Technologies
My role in this project was to design the system, develop the Core, web services and the mobile applications
At Istanbul Bilgi University we have an in house Student Information System which is actively used and developed for more than 15 years (as of 2015). Bilgi SIS has more than 50 applications and some of the applications have 10 to 20 modules. We also have a huge Business Intelligence platform. The web portal, which is the main entry point of SIS, was developed with classic ASP.
During all these years we migrated some parts of the classic ASP portal to new technologies like ASP.NET Web Forms and later to ASP.NET MVC, but BilgiCampus was the biggest migration task my team was challanged. The request from business was to migrate all major student modules to a mobile application in first phase and later do the same for instructor modules as second phase.
We had two possible paths
We decided to follow the second approach. Development started in 2011 and during this same year after 3 months of hard work my team completed the first phase and we published BilgiCampus.
Some features BilgiCampus offers to students are
BilgiCampus is still active and my team continues to add new features to BilgiCampus. We’ve added instructor modules into BilgiCampus and completed phase two a couple of years ago. I’m still actively contributing code to BilgiCampus.
Tools and Technologies
In 2012 I was tasked to provide mobile development consultancy to the Laureate LENS team which was located at Columbia, MD in United States. The LENS team already had the system functioning and they wanted to develop a mobile application before the initial version was deployed to University of Liverpool at UK. LENS was envisioned as fully fledged learning platform which would tie different products and was developed as a Java Spring application with GWT in the front end and MongoDB as the NoSQL database. LENS was integrating to Blackboard, Banner and couple of other systems through TIBCO service bus.
Unfortunatelly the core LENS application was not designed and developed with a Web API and other possible client integrations in mind. We stayed in US for three weeks and we’ve spent the first week reading the Java and Spring code to understand the mechanics of the server application. The second week we spend our time sniffing requests from the GWT front end. We documented all relevant requests with request payload and response details by the end of second week. The third week was fun, we developed a minimal prototype to demonstrate our findings and give the Laureate team a sense of feeling about the posssible mobile technologies they can use. We demonstrated three different technologies; web app with jQuery mobile, native Android app with Java and native iOS app with Xamarin Tools.
We returned to Turkey with the task to develop a JavaScript based mobile application for LENS. After 1 month of design meetings and discussions (over phone) and 1 month of development we delivered the JavaScript based mobile application to LENS team.
Laureate LENS is actively used by University of Liverpool and couple of other Laureate Network Universities. The mobile application we delivered to the LENS team was never published because Laureate decided to abandon the LENS project short after our delivery.
Tools and technologies
If you want to see all the projects I was involved with please visit my LinkedIn profile