I'm Umur_
Principal Software Engineer.
Builder.
I have spent 15+ years building backend systems across enterprise, government, and high-growth environments. I write code, design architectures, and ship products. I stay close to the codebase, especially where performance and correctness matter most. Based in New York City.
Education & Work
A long path from computer engineering school to enterprise platforms, government systems, and high-growth startups.
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Master's - Computer Science
MIU
Iowa, USA
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Bachelor's - Computer Engineering
TOBB ETU
Ankara, Turkey
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Now
Vice President / Lead Software Engineer
Backend systems, platform & architecture
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Past
Senior Architect, Team Leader
Enterprise systems, mobile, full-stack engineering
What I Do
Backend engineering, distributed systems, and the unglamorous work of making things actually run in production.
Spring Boot microservices, REST and GraphQL APIs, event-driven workflows, layered caching, and observability-first design that holds up under load.
End-to-end architecture: data models, service boundaries, message flows, and deployment topology. The decisions you cannot easily undo, made deliberately.
Aligning technical decisions across teams, setting architectural direction, and mentoring engineers without abandoning the keyboard myself.
Deep code reviews on critical paths, architecture deep-dives, and walking junior engineers through the why behind production-ready decisions.
Latest Blog Posts
Notes from production: backend, databases, distributed systems, and the failure modes nobody warned you about.
The Monolith That Works Fine, Thanks
Monoliths aren't a sign of technical immaturity. Most teams don't need microservices. Here's why a well-structured monolith is often the smarter choice.
Read the post →Jun
12
2026
BackendYour @Scheduled Job Is Running Five Times
@Scheduled and cron run per instance, so five replicas run your nightly job five times. Leader election, ShedLock, and why the job must still be idempotent.
Jun
11
2026
BackendVirtual Threads Scale. Structured Concurrency Keeps Them Correct.
Virtual threads made fan-out cheap but not correct. The failed subtask that never cancels its siblings, and how structured concurrency fixes the lifetimes.
Jun
10
2026
BackendRedis Is a Database You Forgot to Capacity-Plan
Redis holds state in finite RAM, so it is a database with a capacity plan, not a magic speed layer. Unbounded keys, eviction policies, and the OOM cliff.
Jun
9
2026
BackendOAuth2 Was a Framework Pretending to Be a Protocol
RFC 6749 calls itself a framework, not a protocol, and that one word explains why every OAuth2 integration is bespoke. The footguns, and what OAuth 2.1 fixes.
Jun
8
2026
DevOpsYour Disaster Recovery Plan Is Fiction Until You Run It
A DR plan you've never run is a hypothesis, not a plan. What only breaks on the real restore, why RTO is fiction until you measure it, and the game-day fix.
Get In Touch
Always happy to talk about backend systems, distributed architecture, or interesting problems. Reach out.