Philosophy
What I'm reading and thinking about — on living, technology, travel, and trying to be deliberate about it all.
On living in four countries and feeling at home in none — and all of them
People ask me where I'm from. I used to say Turkey. Then Colombia. Now I just say "it depends on what you mean by from." There's a specific freedom that comes from not being fully rooted anywhere.
The network engineer's secret: everything is a routing problem
After 20+ years in networking, I've started to see routing logic everywhere. Not as a metaphor — as a genuine mental model.
What Epictetus taught me about downtime and internet outages
Divide everything into what you control and what you don't. Then ruthlessly focus on the first. I think about this every time a network goes down at 2am.
Why I fly drones: it's not about the footage
The footage is a side effect. What I'm actually doing is forcing myself to see a place from a perspective no human body can naturally occupy.
On anger: the Stoic case for pausing before you send that message
Seneca's prescription wasn't suppression — it was delay. Introduce a gap between the feeling and the action.
The case for obsessions over hobbies
The obsessions have produced everything interesting I've ever made or learned. The hobbies mostly produced gear I don't use.
What 20 years of debugging taught me about thinking
The worst sessions shared one thing: I was certain I knew where the problem was before I looked. Certainty made me skip steps.
On food as the most honest form of communication
You can lie in conversation. You can perform in writing. But a dish is what it is. The technique is visible in the result.
Memento mori isn't morbid — it's clarifying
The Stoics practiced the deliberate contemplation of death. Not as a morbid exercise — as a focusing mechanism.