I'm a software engineer based in Helsinki, twelve years in. I grew up in Istanbul and moved here six years ago; the move slowed me down in the right ways.
Most of my paid work has been fullstack — TypeScript and Node — building the kind of systems other people rely on quietly. These days I spend my evenings on smaller, more personal things: mobile apps for problems I actually have.
Right now that's Pulse, an iOS app for couples who want to stay close on the weeks when life gets in the way. The work below is some of what I've shipped and some of what I'm in the middle of. The Now page is where I keep track of what's actually on my desk.
Pulse
A daily check-in for couples, built around one brief, deliberate moment of attention each evening — a home-screen widget, not another inbox.
More projects on the way. I'd rather show one thing I care about than a grid of half-finished ones.
Soon. I'm writing slowly.
Building Pulse — an iOS app for couples that turns the home-screen widget into a daily, ten-second check-in. It's in its first round of friend-testing.
After a decade of server-side TypeScript, mobile is mostly new ground; Expo and the App Store review pipeline are equal parts charming and exasperating.
On the side I'm figuring out what it means to publish my own software as an independent developer for the first time.
Updated .-
Build
The book that finally made me think of products as compounded decisions, not features. Useful reading for anyone shipping a small thing to strangers.
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Thinking in Systems
Reads in a weekend and quietly changes how you look at every dashboard, KPI, and feedback loop you've ever built.
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Tiny Experiments
A gentle counter-argument to grand-plan-thinking. The closest thing I've found to a working theory of the side project.
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Staff Engineer
Useful both as a senior engineer trying to grow and as a reminder that the title isn't the goal.
- hello@cagdascan.com
- github.com/cagdascan
- Helsinki, Finland