Fifteen years of getting pictures and sound onto the screen in your pocket.

I’m Cemal — a senior mobile engineer in Berlin. Most of my career follows one through-line: camera, capture, and media experiences on iOS, with the systems work underneath them.

The arc

I started in Istanbul in 2007, delivering content to WAP phones with barely any bandwidth to work with. By 2010 I was at Haberturk, one of Turkey’s biggest news organizations, building their first iOS app — including live news streaming over Apple HLS when both the protocol and the App Store were young — and an interactive newspaper for the brand-new iPad. That’s where the media through-line of my career starts: getting moving pictures onto mobile devices, reliably.

From 2012 to 2015 I worked with Hipo, a Toronto product studio, building consumer apps from scratch in Objective-C — blogTO, FoodTruckTO, Moment, introduce.social — owning everything from API integration to release management. In 2016, at the ride-sharing startup Volt, I had my first tech-lead role and my favorite systems problem to date: re-architecting ride matching from a polling backend to a real-time system, cutting match times from minutes to seconds.

In 2018 I moved to Berlin to join IDAGIO, the classical-music streaming service. I spent four years there — first owning the player SDK, where I implemented the gapless, lossless playback classical listeners demand, then as iOS Team Lead after the company was acquired, splitting my time roughly 70/30 between code and management. From 2022 to 2024 I went deeper into computer vision at Scandit, working on their scanning SDK in C/C++ and building a SwiftUI augmented-reality shelf-scanning solution from scratch.

Leading, when it’s useful

I’ve led twice — at Volt and at IDAGIO — both times as a hands-on lead who kept shipping while handling mentoring, onboarding, process, and delivery. I’m happy to own a team or a delivery end to end, and equally happy as a senior individual contributor; what I care about is that the thing ships and the people around it get better.

The pause

In March 2024, after seventeen years of back-to-back shipping, I took deliberate time off — and used it well. I pushed my German to B1 (and keep pushing) and settled in Berlin for the long term. No visa question marks, no relocation needed: I’m here, I’m staying, and I’m taking contract engagements now — open to full-time for the right team.

Off the clock

I ride my bike through Berlin, preferably at night — the loop on the home page is one of those rides. And I play games; that’s what pulled me into computers in the first place, and it never really let go.