ahmet alp balkan

bio

Born in Dallas, TX in December, 1989. I'm living in Turkey and studying Computer Engineering as 4^th year student at Bilkent University. My interest areas are web backend development, infrastructure scalability, cloud computing and NoSQL databases. I'm currently co-founding a social web startup called ollaa.

work experience

• (Jun-Aug 2011) Intern at Microsoft Windows Azure Team
• (Jul-Sep 2010) Intern @ Turkcell Technology R&D Incubation Team
• (May-Aug 2010) Contracted Developer @ Google Summer of Code 2010 Program

projects

orman open source object-relational mapping framework for Java. It aims to handle common database usages in small proects (e.g. Android apps) without writing SQL. Aimed to be lightweight and easy to use. Supports MySQL and SQLite. java mysql sqlite

TV Schedule mobile application for Android phones shows daily schedules of Turkish televisions. It has a backend on Heroku PaaS platform. (This app has been ported to iOS by someone else.) play-framework android sdk heroku

trcll.im URL shortener I developed during my internship. It is being used by location based social network Gezenzi and social accounts of TURKCELL. Resistent to high loads and has a developer API. java mysql amazon ec2

PaW installs Pardus-Linux on a virtual disk file on Windows and adds bootloader entry which allows users to boot Pardus without modifying their partition table. Not productized and distributed, yet. python pyqt grub4dos win32api

Hızlı Sözlük mobile application for Android provides practical English-Turkish dictionary lookup with speech recognition. Open sourced under GPL license. android sdk

3^rd party Apps for FriendFeed: ffsms, ffScheduler, ffSpy, ffSummary, ffOldAvatars, WhenDidYouJoinFF?.

Turkish Deasciifier for Java provides functionality to replace ASCII-only Turkish texts with Turkish letters, almost 2000x faster than Zemberek library and distributed under LGPL. Ported from Emre Sevinc's Python implementation of Deniz Yuret's algorithm. java

mySchoolog Web 2.0 service allows students to organize their school life on the Internet. Development is stopped in 2007. Currently running stable with 10,000+ users, reviewed in 200+ magazines and blogs and translated into 18 languages. php mysql ajax

Turkish-Predictive-Text is an experimental open source project for T9-style input word recognition in Turkish for mobile phones. Uses Zemberek NLP library. java

associations

• (2010-...) ACM Student Member
• (2009-...) IEEE Computer Society Student Member
• (2009-...) Chairman ofTurkish IT Association Student Group

honors & awards

• (2010) Google Summer of Code Student at Pardus (a GNU/Linux distro)
• (2010) Microsoft Student Partner
• (2009) High Honor Student at Bilkent University
• (2007) Infomatrix International Programming Contest: Gold Medal / Romania
• (2006) 6^th BITEK-O Web Design Contest 1^st place / Turkey

contact