2026-02-20
Life
3 min read
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, because that's where I was born.
Then I'd add Colombia, because that's where I spent years building a life. Now I just say
"it depends on what you mean by from."
There's a specific kind of freedom that comes from not being fully rooted anywhere.
You stop defending borders you didn't choose. You stop mistaking familiarity for quality.
A cup of çay in Istanbul hits differently when you haven't had one in eight months.
The chaos of Bogotá becomes beautiful when you're not afraid of it anymore.
Belonging isn't about geography. It's about the people and rituals you choose to return to.
The downside is real too. Friendships that never go deep because you're always leaving.
A permanent outsider tax. Missing weddings and funerals. But I've made peace with it —
not because I don't feel the weight, but because I've learned to carry it without letting it
slow me down.
2026-02-10
Tech & Mind
4 min read
The network engineer's secret: everything is a routing problem
After 20+ years of working with networks, I've started to see routing logic everywhere.
Not as a metaphor — as a genuine mental model for how the world works.
A routing protocol doesn't know the full map of the internet. It only knows its neighbors,
the cost to reach them, and the rules for sharing that information. Yet from millions of
these local conversations, global connectivity emerges. No central coordinator. No complete
picture. Just honest local information propagating outward.
Careers work the same way. You don't need to see the destination. You need to know your
neighbors (the people around you), maintain honest cost calculations (what am I actually
good at, what do I actually want), and keep updating your routing table as the topology changes.
BGP doesn't panic when a path disappears. It recalculates and converges.
That's not a bad life strategy.
2026-01-28
Stoicism
3 min read
What Epictetus taught me about downtime and internet outages
Epictetus was a slave who became one of the most influential philosophers in history.
His central idea was simple: divide everything in life into two categories — things within
your control, and things outside it. Then ruthlessly focus on the first and stop suffering
about the second.
I think about this during network outages. When a circuit goes down, you can't control
the upstream provider's infrastructure. You can't control the storm that severed the fiber.
What you can control: your escalation path, your communication to the business,
the quality of your failover design, and whether you panic or stay methodical.
Most people spend their professional energy on the wrong column. They lose sleep over
things that were never in their hands to begin with. The Stoic practice isn't about
not caring — it's about directing care precisely where it can actually do something.
2026-01-12
Travel
2 min read
Why I fly drones: it's not about the footage
The footage is a side effect. What I'm actually doing when I fly is forcing myself to
see a place from a perspective that no human body can naturally occupy.
From the ground, Medellín is chaotic — cables crossing streets, motorbikes weaving,
vendors and noise. From 80 meters, it becomes a system. You see how the hills shape
the neighborhoods, how the metro cable connects what roads can't, how the city
breathes differently in the morning versus the afternoon.
I think that's why I kept going back. Not for the cinematic shots. For the reminder
that almost every overwhelming thing looks manageable from far enough away.