About Me

Hey there, fellow traveler. I'm Mustafa - a founder and builder based in California. I build data infrastructure and developer tools. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── How it started ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── I grew up in Alanya, a small town on the Mediterranean coast of Turkey. There was no internet. There was no software community. There was a kid with a 386 and a lot of curiosity. I taught myself MS-DOS from books I bought on summer trips to Ankara. Then GW-BASIC. Then Pascal. Then C. Then x86 assembly. Each one from a book, each one alone, each one in a bedroom in a coastal town where nobody else cared about computers. Then I bought my first modem. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── The modem changed everything ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── I was in middle school. The modem was 14.4k. I plugged it into the phone line, dialed a BBS in Ankara, and watched text scroll across my screen from someone else's computer, hundreds of kilometers away. I was blown away. Suddenly I was connected to other people who cared about the same things I cared about. Software enthusiasts. Programmers. SysOps running boards out of their bedrooms. People across Turkey on HitNet. People across the world on FidoNet. It was not the internet. It was better than the internet, in a way. It was small enough to know people by name. Every caller was real. Every message was written by someone who had paid for the phone call to send it. That modem changed my life. It changed how I understood computers. They were not just machines you programmed alone in a room. They were bridges to other people. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── What I do now ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── These days I pour that same energy into Peaka - a data integration platform that lets you query all your SaaS data in one place. Like a data warehouse, minus the warehouse. Before that: two decades of building data infrastructure, developer tools, and internal platforms. Java, then Rust, then whatever the problem demands. The thread that connects all of it is the same thread that connected a kid in Alanya to a BBS in Ankara: making data move between systems that were never designed to talk to each other. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── Why this site exists ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── This site is a tribute. To the SysOps who paid for the phone lines. To the BBS software authors who wrote RemoteAccess and Terminate and Front Door. To FidoNet and HitNet and the echomail conferences where I learned that programming was not a solo sport. To the era when 16 colors, 80 columns, and a 14.4k modem were enough to build a community that spanned the world. The technologies from that era had a huge impact on my life. This site is my way of keeping them alive. I still believe the terminal is the most honest interface ever built. ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────── ▓▓ GitHub github.com/sakalsiz ▓▓ LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/sakalsiz ▓▓ X x.com/sakalsiz