About

Posted on 4 mins read

Ahmet Altay, a Software Engineering Manager at Google, leads a team that develops open-source data-processing systems. He is a Member of the Apache Software Foundation, and contributes to the Apache Beam project. He is also an aspiring writer and an entrepreneur. Previously, he worked at Microsoft on operating systems and earned a master’s degree from Stanford University. Originally from Turkey, Ahmet now lives in California and shares his joy of open spaces, long walks, sci-fi, and learning with his friends and family.

Ahmet loves thinking about people and technology. He shares his thoughts on software, management, organizations, products, open-source, data analytics, AI and more on this blog! You can subscribe to receive updates from Ahmet.

Hi! 👋

I am a software engineer for fun and profit. I had my first computer when I was eight years old and wrote my first BASIC program the same year. I was sent to an extracurricular course at school to learn how to use a computer, and by some stroke of luck, they tried to teach us programming. I enjoyed it, but the other kids probably didn’t. I’ve been writing software ever since.

I enjoy developing in Python, JavaScript, C and Go, and occasionally dabbling in Java. You can find some of my recent work on my projects page. I have been working on distributed data processing and open source in the past 10 years. Before that, I worked in mobile and embedded systems; and created apps for Android, Bada, Brew, Blackberry, iOS, J2ME, Nook, Symbian, Windows Mobile, and more.

I am also an aspiring entrepreneur. I’ve been selling things since middle school, starting with trading MTG cards for a 10x profit. I used to discuss business ideas a lot with an old friend of mine, but he turned out to be more of a doer than I am, and ended up selling a lot more than I did. While I’ve entered a few contests and built a few things, I’ve never actually started a company. I am hopeful that I will change that one day.

Furthermore, I am an aspiring writer. I’ve been writing a personal blog since 20041. I used to write before then. I was good at writing essays back in school. I used to write different things, some people loved it some hate. I wanted to write a book for a long a while but never actually started. I was writing Haikus and published a collection at some point.

But I am much more than just my professional and creative pursuits. I am the son of a loving family, the brother of an awesome sister, the husband of a loving wife, the father of two little ones, and the friend of many amazing people.

Disclaimer: I work at Google, but the opinions stated here are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer.

Recommendations

A running list of my favorite people, places, products, phenomena…

  • Libby is a user-friendly and free reading app that allows you to borrow books from local libraries. It’s compatible with various platforms and ebook readers, making it an excellent option. I read most of my books on Libby, and I highly recommend it to fellow book lovers.

Books

I enjoy reading books, and keep a list of the books I read. Last few books I read:

  1. You can find links to my earlier writing and digital history since 1997 in this post. You can also read my old (2005-2013) old Turkish blog. ↩︎

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