Who am I ?

My name Oğuzhan. My close friends call me Oğuz ( /oɣuz/ ) and people who are not familiar with “ğ” in Turkish alphabet call me just Oz, not only for easiness but also for the some clever approaches I made in work life resembles a wizard-like action.

I was born in Istanbul sometime back in 20th century. As Istanbul’s unavoidable destiny had been to be a symbolic city of cultural harmony for millenniums, so I’m. Not surprisingly when I trace my origins, I ended up finding cities which are thousands of kilometers away from where I live, the old settlements which right now reside in other countries. This makes me a bid sad but proud of my ancestors who faced and overcame struggles in their lives.

Bio

After graduating from Physics department of METU in Ankara, completing all courses of a four year curriculum in three years and taking some MSc degree courses, I returned back to Istanbul and started professional life and I worked in several companies in IT Industry, some well known vendors, systems integrator and a distributor mostly around networking and computing for more than 20 years. In my early years of professional life I also studied MBA at Yeditepe University in Istanbul, and tried some engineering science courses about nuclear energy at Istanbul Technical University before putting full focus to my career.

Skills and Interests

Electronics was one of my first hobbies which I acquainted with when I was around 11. During high school I become capable of designing some circuits, pcb making, driving the circuitry in pcb boards. I even entered a competition organised by The Scientific and Technological Council of Turkey where I presented my circuit design which was overcoming some electric surges in power supplies which occur after mains failures by adding a FET driven feedback to advanced regulator ICs. Attending this competition led me to start Advanced Physics curriculum at METU and open door to experience research in Semiconductor Research Laboratory and Clean Room and meet very nice people including my wife.

Computers entered my life when I was at primary school, with ZX Spectrum+, which myself and my brother worked during summertime to pay the installments. BASIC programming was the first programming language I learned and by age of 13 I was able to write codes for several sorting algorithms. At age 16 I was sitting in front of a Windows computer where I was optimizing the density and quality of the stitches of embroidery machines. At last year of high school I was in front of Novell Netware network of computers and on my first month of starting university this also gave me the admin rights of a network with 400 users on Banyan Vines and experienced Ultrix on old DEC systems.

Linux entered my life in 1994 when I own my first x86 computer with 486DX4-100 processor with full VESA cards. Slackware was one of the first operating systems I learned other than Windows variants. Until I met with Gentoo in later years I don’t remember how many Linux variants I used.

Leaving the MSc program and returning back to Istanbul put me in my first IT job where I learned end to end system management and basic routing which put me in my second job, an IT distributor, where I learned hard core networking and security. I got familiarity with switches, routers, convergence technologies, firewalls, system management and business continuity applications, etc. My third job was about network and IT management with a well known multinational IT vendor, fourth was security during which I was giving firewall trainings to other IT companies over a virtualized environment, got knowledge of IDS, honeypot, penetration techniques etc, fifth was networking with another multinational networking vendor. During this time I was very deep into Gentoo and creating some specific appliances with miraculous Linux kernel to create test environment for VoIP, DSL, Wi-Fi products. As a side job I had my own SLA with a multinational company for which I designed a state of the art all-in-one firewall appliance from scratch with Gentoo. My sixth job was again IT related during conscription where I put another level to my Linux knowledge. Seventh job and the longest one was with just another multinational where I put in-depths computing industry knowledge to my CV.