About

Hi, I’m Samet. I live in Bonn, Germany, and I make computers do things. Every project I start begins with a clear idea and ends with a clear idea; the trouble is everything in between, which is usually a lot of branching, some regret, and one full rewrite. I have made peace with the middle part.

It all started with a physics degree at Istanbul Technical University, where I learned that quantum mechanics is the only field in which “it works, but nobody knows why” counts as a valid conclusion. That turned out to be excellent preparation for software, so I moved to computational science and never looked back.

My PhD was about predicting crystal structures: you give the computer a handful of atoms, and it works out how they will arrange themselves. Nature does this in a fraction of a second. My software needed 50,000 CPU cores and most of my twenties, but in the end it won the university’s best-thesis award, so the software is doing fine. I am the one who still cannot pronounce “borohydride” on the first try.

Along the way I built and looked after an HPC cluster, spent some months at Stanford working on solid-state batteries, and wrote a lot of Fortran that I will neither confirm nor deny.

These days I work at ECMWF, the European weather forecasting centre. I do not forecast the weather myself; I build and run the software around it, which means Rust, Python, Kubernetes, and enough YAML to wallpaper a small house.

The habit of making computers do things does not stop at work. At home I keep buying small boards with too many pins, and lately that means FPGAs, which I am learning by trial and error, mostly error. I also love the Sega Dreamcast and the original Xbox, and the Xbox occasionally runs Gentoo, because no computer in this house is safe from me. This site is where I write down what I figure out along the way, mostly so I do not have to figure it out twice.

You can reach me, why not.