About

I am a developer, writer, and entrepreneur. Through my company Red Black Tree (www.redblack3.com), I try to help others create better and more beautiful software. Sometimes I write and speak on development practices in venues such as SQE (www.sqe.com) and the Agile Journal (www.agilejournal.com). You can follow what’s new with me at www.redblack3.com/blog, a blog dedicated to optimizing the software development lifecycle.

Throughout the years I developed interest in studying people, practices and tools. As the variety of my tasks increased, specialty gave way and today I am happy to consider myself a versatilitist, or jack of all trades. My expertise ranges from programming and architecting in Java, .NET and ActionScript, to database programming and management, to rich internet applications, build and deployment automation, quality coding practices, Agile methods, and more. I have held technical and managerial jobs from system maintenance to director of development.

Still, I remain a developer at heart with a healthy appetite for calculated risks. I believe one way to improve is to continuously push the envelope by observing what works, dropping what doesn’t and exploring new practices, tools and platforms. These are activities that generally involve some risk and I see it as part of my job to study, communicate and manage that risk.

Customers

• FINRA (Rockville, MD)
• Sprint (Overland Park, KS)
• Yellow Roadway Transportation (Kansas City, KS)
• Freddie Mac (McLean, VA)
• Symantec (Alexandria, VA and Calgary, BC - Canada)
• CollegeBoard (Reston, VA)
• National Cancer Institute (Rockville, MD)

Publications

• Contributed to appendix in Continuous Integration: Improving Software Quality and Reducing Risk, The Addison-Wesley Signature Series, June 2007
• Increasing Business Value by Adopting Agile Methods, Agile Journal, May 2007
• Transitioning to Agile in Onshore-Offshore Distributed Teams, Agile Journal, Feb. 2007
• 10 Mistakes in Transitioning to Agile, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Dec. 2006
• Proxy Settings in Eclipse, Eclipse Zone, Nov. 2006
• A Culture of Inclusion, Dr. Dobb’s Journal, Sep. 2006
• Improving Code Quality with PMD and Eclipse, JavaLobby, Mar. 2006
• Remote Debugging with Eclipse, EclipseZone, Dec. 2005

Conferences, Workshops & Webinars

• Workshop: Improving Code Quality with Eclipse and its Java Plug-ins, NCI, Sep 08, Rockville, MD
• Webinar: How to Increase Business Value by Transitioning to Agile, Product Mgmt View, Jul 07
• Extreme Lessons from Extreme Programming, International Conference on Software Process Improvement (ICSPI), November 2007, Orlando, FL
• Improving Code Quality with Eclipse and its Java Plug-ins, Better Software Conference, June 2007, Las Vegas, Nevada

Open-Source Projects

• SourceForge:JAMIS (Jacoozi Application Management and Integration Server), Project Founder and Admin, Since Mar, 2005
• SourceForge:XmlConfig (Custom Ant task for XML file manipulations), Project Founder and Admin, Since Mar, 2005
• SourceForge:DbConfig (Custom Ant task for database operations such as JDCB connection validation and SQL queries), Project Founder and Admin, Since Mar, 2005
• MamboForge:MamboCSM (Content Management System written in PHP), Tester and commiter, Since Jun, 2005
• SugarForge:SugarCRM (SugarCRM is a Customer Relationship Management System written in PHP), Tester, Since Jan, 2005

Certifications

• SCRUM Alliance - Certified Product Owner - Since ‘06 2009
• SCRUM Alliance - Certified ScrumMaster - Since ‘06 2007
• Sun Certified Enterprise Architect - Since ‘12 2002
• IBM Certified Enterprise Developer - WebSphere Studio
• Sun Certified Web Component Developer - Since ‘1 2002
• Sun Certified Programmer for Java 2

Education

• Bachelor of Science, Computer Engineering, Bosphorus University, Istanbul TURKEY