about

Hi, I’m Şafak.

I’m a software engineer and an academic who loves coding and video games. Ever since the first time I pressed a key on a keyboard and got the response on the screen, I knew that my whole life will be around these technologies. A few months later I played my first video game and my life changed completely.

I love software, and I love solving complex problems. I’ve been working as a software engineer for almost 6 years now, mostly on the back-end. I established two different initiatives which one of them funded by the government. And currently, I’m using my experience and knowledge as a Senior Software Engineer at EVAM.

I have always enjoyed coding no matter how little or big the project was. But I could not take my hands off the academy completely. In the first few years of my academic journey (in Istanbul Technical University as an MSc student) I realized that I can combine my passions, and worked on Procedural Content Generation for video games. After a successful thesis defense, I’ve decided to change my academic direction towards more design-oriented aspects of video games. Because, I always believed that a well-defined problem is more important than the solution itself, like Murat Menteş said in his book “Dublörün Dilemması”, “The important thing was to raise the problem, the solution would be eventually found.”. Currently, I’m working towards my Ph.D. in Narrative in Games at Özyeğin University.