Let me introduce myself while Claude Code works!

How I went from writing my first line of Objective-C code to delivering products at AI velocity

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The Beginning: Before Mobile Engineering Era - 2014

As I am writing this Claude Code is working on my new project so I will try to keep it brief, I need to prepare the next module prompt!

I was a Computer Engineering student at Bahcesehir University when I landed an internship at a London fintech startup. To be honest, at first I didn't want to work in summer at all... I wanted to do Erasmus exchange program. Thanks to my cousin's constant insistence and pressure on me and my parents, I started this internship.

What can I say... We wouldn't know the other scenario but from looking at the past now I believe the internship was the correct decision. I would lie if I told you that I am not curious about how my life would have been if I had taken the other path. My best guess would be starting the company 2 years late.

I knew some people in the company, I was coming to the office for my school projects to get "assistance" from more experienced developers like my cousin.

Anyways, after hilarious jokes from my cousin like "come to the office with a suit, we are an important company", I started the internship at the company...

The Startup: A Decade

I have spent nearly 11 years in Invstr. To summarize in one sentence, Invstr started as a Fantasy Finance game where you were able to buy and sell stocks with virtual money and compete with other people, then it evolved into a huge educational financial product where you could buy and sell actual stocks and cryptocurrencies with banking capabilities.

Spending this amount of time in a startup teaches you a lot, so even though I complained from time to time because of workload, project changes, or deletion of a feature we just developed, I learned invaluable lessons.

If you know what you are doing and are eager to learn about programming languages, SDKs, and development environments, you learn tons of stuff which people in the industry have no idea about. Don't take this as bragging, but after I left Invstr for a new "bigger/structured" company, I realized that people don't know most of the stuff which I had considered to be very basic.

Anyways, maybe I will dive into some fun/stressful/educational memories in my startup era later on, for now I want to keep it short.

The Corporate: A Snail

Well, I ran for 10 years, so after landing in a bigger and more structured corporate company, I had to learn how to walk. The stories here are for another time, but everything was manageable for me for a while.

At the same time when I left Invstr, I decided to pursue developing apps on my own and try to earn financial independence. I started with OpenAI API wrapper apps. During these 1.5 years, I have developed and deployed around 7-8 apps; some are doing very well at the moment, some are just sitting idle with no traffic. I have discovered many concepts and learned as much as possible about them, and I tried to leverage my experience from the startup company.

I am talking about past 2-3 years (who knows the exact date!) from the day I started writing this blog. We all know what happened this year, and that's the reason I wanted to start writing blog content.

The AI: AKA Oh my god we are going to lose our jobs

Why I Embraced AI

I'll be honest: I felt very late at the start, seeing many apps going to 1M ARR and my app not even getting $10 MRR. From time to time, I tried to implement an AI feature using the OpenAI API to understand the infrastructure and keep myself up to date.

When I first got involved with this AI shenanigan, like everyone else, I was in a chat with ChatGPT or Claude and implementing the suggestions/solutions.

Then came Codex.

I integrated my GitHub to it and started localization on my apps. Even just seeing the tip of the iceberg and not knowing the full capabilities, I was amazed because we all know localization sucks.

Since my X algorithm was heavily focused on development-related tech stuff, I started to see Claude Code usage with CLI and said "Why not?"

I haven't been coding on my personal projects since then. For the past 6-8 months, I have configured Claude Code/Codex in a way that mimics the way I develop. That's not the only thing I use them for—I use them for nearly every computer-related task, from audio editing, folder management, and bulk operations to product management and many more use cases!