--- title: "Growing Up Building Software in Istanbul" description: "On coding culture in Turkey, being bilingual in a global industry, and what it means to build a London-headquartered company from the Bosphorus." date: 2025-08-24T00:00:00.000Z category: Career readingTime: "3 min read" --- There is a cargo ship passing beneath the Bosphorus Bridge right now. I know this because I can see it from where I run most mornings, along the waterfront on the Asian side. It is probably carrying something industrial. It does not care about my API response times or my deployment pipeline or the fact that my latest pull request has a failing test. I find this extremely comforting. Istanbul is a city of sixteen million people, split across two continents, knotted with traffic, loud with construction, beautiful in a way that does not ask your permission. I have built every piece of software I have ever shipped from this city. HMD Corporation is headquartered in London, but the work, the actual fingers-on-keyboards work, happens here. --- Turkey has a developer community that the wider tech world rarely notices. The universities produce strong computer science graduates. The freelance and startup scenes in Istanbul and Ankara are active. There is genuine talent. What is missing is not capability. It is visibility. A developer in San Francisco builds an average CRUD application and gets a TechCrunch article. A developer in Istanbul builds something remarkable and struggles to find anyone outside the country who has heard of it. This asymmetry shaped my decisions from the very beginning. I defaulted to English for everything: documentation, commit messages, variable names, marketing, this blog. Not because Turkish is inadequate. Because the audience for software is global, and the language of that global market is English. Building in English from day one meant HMD's products never needed "internationalisation" as a special project. They were international by default. That decision, made almost unconsciously at age twelve, turned out to be one of the most consequential choices I ever made. --- Being bilingual in software is not the advantage people imagine. It is more of a tax. Technical conversation in Turkish is awkward. The language never developed native equivalents for most programming terms. Nobody says "dağıtılmış sürüm kontrol sistemi" when they mean "distributed version control system." You code-switch mid-sentence, Turkish grammar wrapped around English technical nouns, and it works, but it creates a cognitive load that is hard to explain to someone who has not lived it. Writing is where the tax hits hardest. I write this blog in English. I think about code in English. I dream about bugs in English (this actually happens, and it is never pleasant). But I argue with my friends in Turkish, navigate Turkish bureaucracy in Turkish, and talk to my family in Turkish. The switching is automatic now, but for years it felt like being two slightly different people occupying the same skull. --- HMD Corporation is registered in the UK. The reasons are practical: British company law is well-understood internationally, London is a financial centre, and a UK entity simplifies dealings with international partners. But the daily reality of the company is this flat in Istanbul, this desk, this view of the Bosphorus if I crane my neck. The time zone helps. GMT+3 overlaps with European business hours in the morning and stretches towards Middle Eastern markets in the afternoon. The cost of living, while climbing, still means the same budget buys more engineering hours here than in London or Berlin. What makes the arrangement genuinely work, though, is that software does not care where you sit. A commit pushed from Kadıköy reaches the same server as one pushed from Shoreditch. Deployments are automated. Code reviews are asynchronous. The location of the person writing the code matters a little less every year. Cultural fluency matters more. Operating a UK company from Istanbul means reading two different registers of professionalism. British business communication values understatement. Turkish communication values warmth and relationship-building. The emails I send to UK partners are not the same as the messages I exchange with collaborators in Istanbul. Neither register is better. They are tools for different contexts, like languages themselves. --- Istanbul teaches you things about software that the Bay Area probably would not. The city is chaotic. Traffic defies modelling. Bureaucracy is labyrinthine. Infrastructure works most of the time, which is not the same as working all of the time. Living here makes you instinctively build systems that expect failure. Not perfect systems, but resilient ones. Systems that degrade gracefully, recover automatically, and keep functioning when individual components misbehave. Good engineering, in other words. When a production incident feels catastrophic, I go for a run along the waterfront. The cargo ships pass beneath the bridge. The seagulls are loud. The simit sellers are doing business at six in the morning regardless of what is happening in anyone's Kubernetes cluster. The world is bigger than your screen. Istanbul reminds you of that every day, whether you want reminding or not.