# Umut Güden

> Founder and Chairman of HMD Corporation, a multinational holding company with divisions in technology, finance, entertainment, and commerce.

## Site: https://guden.tr

## Pages
- [Home](https://guden.tr/)
- [Projects](https://guden.tr/projects)
- [Blog](https://guden.tr/blog)
- [Contact](https://guden.tr/contact)

## Blog Posts
- [Finding Balance in a Busy Schedule](https://guden.tr/blog/finding-balance-in-a-busy-schedule) - Umut Güden discusses the importance of physical activity and mental well-being in his daily life. (2026-04-05T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/finding-balance-in-a-busy-schedule/md
- [Designing Your Site for AI Agents: llms.txt, RSS, and Semantic HTML](https://guden.tr/blog/ai-agents-and-personal-sites) - How to make your personal site readable by AI agents and LLMs - implementing llms.txt, structured RSS, semantic HTML, and machine-readable metadata. (2026-03-29T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/ai-agents-and-personal-sites/md
- [Design as Communication](https://guden.tr/blog/design-as-communication) - How I think about product design, why typography matters more than colour, and what a hotel door in London taught me about interfaces. (2026-03-01T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/design-as-communication/md
- [Building a Zero-Fee Payment Infrastructure](https://guden.tr/blog/building-a-zero-fee-payment-infrastructure) - How HMD Pay charges nothing for payment processing, and why the model that everyone said was impossible has been running for over three years. (2026-02-15T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/building-a-zero-fee-payment-infrastructure/md
- [Building Apps With a Purpose: Charitable Payments in iOS](https://guden.tr/blog/building-apps-with-purpose) - Integrating charitable micro-donations into iOS apps using StoreKit - the technical implementation and the philosophy behind purpose-driven software. (2026-01-18T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/building-apps-with-purpose/md
- [The AlarmKit Journey: Building Snooze If You Can](https://guden.tr/blog/swift-ios-alarmkit-journey) - The story behind Snooze If You Can - an iOS alarm app built in Swift and SwiftUI, from concept to open-source release. (2026-01-04T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/swift-ios-alarmkit-journey/md
- [On Youth and Leadership](https://guden.tr/blog/on-youth-and-leadership) - Thoughts on leading a company before turning eighteen, and why age is a worse predictor of capability than people assume. (2025-12-07T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/on-youth-and-leadership/md
- [Next.js 15 on Vercel: Performance Patterns That Matter](https://guden.tr/blog/nextjs-15-performance-patterns) - Performance optimization patterns for Next.js 15 deployed on Vercel - from React Server Components to image optimization and edge middleware. (2025-11-09T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/nextjs-15-performance-patterns/md
- [Why a Tech Company Started a Record Label](https://guden.tr/blog/building-hmd-entertainment) - How and why HMD Corporation launched an entertainment division covering record labels, distribution, and artist management. (2025-10-12T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/building-hmd-entertainment/md
- [What Shutting Down SmmPres Taught Me](https://guden.tr/blog/shutting-down-smmpres) - SmmPres ran for two years, served thousands of users, and then I shut it down. This is what I learned from building and killing a product. (2025-09-14T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/shutting-down-smmpres/md
- [Growing Up Building Software in Istanbul](https://guden.tr/blog/growing-up-building-software-istanbul) - On coding culture in Turkey, being bilingual in a global industry, and what it means to build a London-headquartered company from the Bosphorus. (2025-08-24T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/growing-up-building-software-istanbul/md
- [What Five Years of Building a Company Taught Me About Software](https://guden.tr/blog/five-years-shipping-lessons) - Reflections after five years running HMD Corporation - the principles that survived and the assumptions that didn't. (2025-08-10T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/five-years-shipping-lessons/md
- [Full-Stack TypeScript in 2025: Our Stack at HMD Developments](https://guden.tr/blog/typescript-full-stack-2025) - The complete TypeScript stack we use at HMD Developments in 2025 - from Next.js to infrastructure, and why we chose every piece. (2025-07-06T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/typescript-full-stack-2025/md
- [School, Startups, and the Art of Context Switching](https://guden.tr/blog/school-startups-context-switching) - On balancing university entrance exam preparation with running a multinational company, and why the two are not as incompatible as they sound. (2025-06-22T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/school-startups-context-switching/md
- [CI/CD Pipelines That Don't Make You Cry](https://guden.tr/blog/cicd-pipelines-that-work) - Practical CI/CD pipeline design for small teams - from GitHub Actions to deployment strategies, built for speed and reliability. (2025-06-08T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/cicd-pipelines-that-work/md
- [Designing APIs Developers Actually Want to Use](https://guden.tr/blog/designing-apis-developers-love) - Principles for API design that prioritize developer experience - from URL structure to error messages, learned from building payment and communication APIs. (2025-05-11T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/designing-apis-developers-love/md
- [Choosing the Right Database: A Practical Decision Framework](https://guden.tr/blog/choosing-the-right-database) - A practical framework for choosing between PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, and other databases - based on real decisions across 25+ projects. (2025-04-13T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/choosing-the-right-database/md
- [Why TypeScript Is Worth the Investment](https://guden.tr/blog/why-typescript-is-worth-it) - A practical argument for TypeScript over plain JavaScript - with real examples from production codebases where type safety prevented bugs and improved developer experience. (2025-03-16T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/why-typescript-is-worth-it/md
- [DevOps Lessons: Running Kubernetes in Production](https://guden.tr/blog/devops-lessons-kubernetes-production) - Hard-won lessons from running Kubernetes clusters for HMD Developments - from initial setup mistakes to production-ready configurations. (2025-03-02T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/devops-lessons-kubernetes-production/md
- [Open Source Licensing: What I Learned the Hard Way](https://guden.tr/blog/open-source-licensing-lessons) - Navigating open source licensing as a developer and company founder - from choosing CC BY-NC-SA to implementing commercial dual licensing. (2025-02-02T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/open-source-licensing-lessons/md
- [Buying a Company at Fourteen](https://guden.tr/blog/hmd-pay-acquisition) - The story of how HMD Corporation came to own a payment processing platform, and what due diligence looks like when you are still in secondary school. (2025-01-19T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/hmd-pay-acquisition/md
- [Building a Zero-Fee Payment API: Technical Decisions](https://guden.tr/blog/zero-fee-payments-technical-deep-dive) - The architecture and technical decisions behind HMD Payments - a zero-fee payment platform supporting crypto, Papara, IBAN, and card transactions. (2025-01-05T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/zero-fee-payments-technical-deep-dive/md
- [Deploying a Multinational Holding - HMD Corp's Architecture](https://guden.tr/blog/hmd-corp-architecture) - How we structured HMD Corp across four divisions - Technology, Finance, Entertainment, and Commercial - and the technical infrastructure that connects them. (2024-12-08T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/hmd-corp-architecture/md
- [Real-Time Invite Tracking and Fake Account Detection](https://guden.tr/blog/invite-tracking-fake-detection) - How the HMD Developments team built a Discord invite tracking system that handles thousands of events per minute and detects fake accounts using behavioral heuristics. (2024-11-24T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/invite-tracking-fake-detection/md
- [MongoDB Patterns I Learned from 7,500 Discord Servers](https://guden.tr/blog/mongodb-patterns-discord-bots) - Practical MongoDB patterns for high-throughput applications - from schema design to indexing strategies, learned the hard way running Discord bots at scale. (2024-11-10T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/mongodb-patterns-discord-bots/md
- [Building Discord Bots at Scale: Chat Guard Architecture](https://guden.tr/blog/building-discord-bots-at-scale) - The architecture decisions behind Chat Guard - a Discord moderation bot serving 7,500+ servers and 15M+ users, built and maintained by the HMD Developments team. (2024-10-13T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/building-discord-bots-at-scale/md
- [From My First Website to My First Startup](https://guden.tr/blog/first-website-to-first-startup) - How building a fan site for a Turkish cartoon at 12 led to founding a multinational holding company - the origin story of HMD Corporation. (2024-09-29T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/first-website-to-first-startup/md
- [Why I Built This Site](https://guden.tr/blog/launching-guden-tr) - The thinking behind guden.tr, why personal sites still matter, and what I plan to write about here. (2024-09-15T00:00:00.000Z)
  Raw markdown: https://guden.tr/api/blog/launching-guden-tr/md

## Feeds
- RSS: https://guden.tr/rss.xml
- llms.txt: https://guden.tr/llms.txt

## Contact
- Email: contact [at] umutguden [dot] tr
- GitHub: https://github.com/umutguden
- X: https://x.com/umutguden0
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/umutguden