Murat Çorlu

I met with computers when I was 13 (1995). I saw computer for the first time at my cousin and I loved at first sight. Then my father couldn't resist my insistences and bought me a 2nd hand Commodore Amiga 500 (because it was just cheap). After spending a few months by just playing games and improving my curiousity how all of those thing work, I met with an older brother who has a Commodore 64. And he was doing something magical: coding. I just said please teach me how to write that (the code he showed was a hangman game). Then I met with QBasic.

I spent 2 years by playing with QBasic. My father bought me a PC, Pentium 166. Then I saw a thick book named "Visual Basic". Just because of "Basic" I interested in with it, started reading it in bookstore and then noticed that I can do it.

I made many Windows applications for myself. A batch file renamer (needed for organizing my MP3 files), a birthday reminder and my highschool graduation yearbook, a digital one, in year 2000.

In 1998, internet cafes were very popular in my town. One of them owned by my someone I knew. Once I visited him, o noticed that he's doing so much manual staff to track the customers usage times and amounts. He was using stickers to write start times, then doing some calculation for the amount at the end. I asked "an application would be very helpful for you", and he said "if you make for me, it'll definitely be". I didn't sleep next 2 nights and made a basic app for him. When I presented him, he loved and directly started using it. And he said internet cafe is free for me from now on. That was the first moment that I noticed that I can help people and earn money by coding.

After meeting with internet, I learned a lot about programming. Gradually I moved to web programming because it was exciting to be part of internet and reach anywhere in the world. I learned ASP, then ASP.NET, then PHP and Linux. I made more digital graduation yearbooks until 2006 (with Adobe Director). After university, I started my professional programming life in some small companies. Then step by step I started working for biggest internet companies of the Turkey.

Now I'm in my 40s and I'm still learning a lot every day and still trying new ideas, projects tirelessly. I love creating useful things with programming, the best tool that I have.

So, I'm Murat Çorlu, a software developer based in The Netherlands and this is my blog about my work. I also have a Turkish blog and micro-blogging on Mastodon at [email protected].