Hello
My name is Dora, and I am a software developer from Turkey. I live in London.
Education
MSc - City St. George's, University of London
(Present) MSc in Computer Game Technologies with VR
Undergrad - Sabanci University
(January 2023)
BSc in Computer Science - 4.00 GPA - First ranking student
Minor in Philosophy
Work Experience
Full Stack PHP/Laravel Developer @ Freelance
(March 2025 - Present) I develop bespoke web and mobile apps for businesses. I use Laravel/PHP for web and Flutter or React Native for mobile. Sometimes I do this with friends and sometimes alone. I worked on Meti-Box last year, and right now I'm working on Meti-Bills and Musiki FM.
Full Stack PHP/Laravel Developer @ Net Koruma
(September 2023 - March 2025)
Net Koruma is a B2B anti-phishing solution. We find phishing online and report them to relevant authorities. I found this to be a very valuble and ethical business. My responsibilities were basically everything. Optimizations, new features, automatization of tasks to relieve the burden of the analysts.
I worked on scrapers, facebook ad library, instagram mobile app, and more.
Mobile developer @ Upcarta
(March 2022 - September 2023)
Upcarta is a platform for discovering, organizing and sharing content. Its killer feature is gathering scattered content recommendations, curations and collections from all around the web, streamlining the process of discovering content. I have a strong belief that what matters to humans will be humans they care about.
For the past year, I have been developing the mobile app of Upcarta. We use Flutter.
I learned Flutter all by myself and taught the rest of the team on the go. I had to make the architectural and stylistic decisions because flutter didn't/doesn't really have the idiomatic ways to guide us. It was quite a challenge.
One thing that made everything too difficult was the "Clean Code" advice we found on the internet as complete beginners. It overcomplicated things and we didn't know what we were doing for a long time. I would do things very differently today.
Upcarta is on the app stores.
Visiting Researcher Intern @ University of Kent
(Summer 2022)
At Kent, I was responsible with implementing a tool to collect data about DDoS protection adoption across the internet. I used Go, MongoDB and GCC. Since the tool was meant to scan the a huge number of domains weekly, it had to be performant. I benchmarked several approaches and libraries.
During the internship, I discovered my interest in programming languages and explored the academic life. I love learning new programming syntax, semantics and paradigms.
NLP Intern @ YAZI AI
(Summer 2021)
This project aimed to be a pioneer in Turkish NLP, as it was one of the first works on Turkish Financial Sentiment Analysis. I built scrapers for financial news websites and stock market movements. Then I tried to apply NER to the data I collected. The internship ended due to time constraints before I could complete the project. I worked with Python.
I was completely inexperienced and mostly confused. I was very dependent on my supervisor and she was quite busy, so things did not really go as I wanted them to go.
Today
I am working as a freelance software developer and my game Mania. I am using Odin and Raylib to make my game. The main goals are (1) become a great programmer and (2) make this a beautiful, real game.