Once again, hello! I’m Yigid BALABAN, a 23 y/o hobbyist-turned-professional:
- engineer: completed BEng Computer Eng. at (Uludag University)
- researcher: at (Turkcell)’s Network Assurance & R&D
- developer: of open source projects, tools and applications
- leader: currently leading (Arbeit Collective)
Some of the recent highlights about me are:
- I’ve moved to Istanbul, after living with my family. This marks a chapter in my life where I’ll focus more on self-hosting my services, build out my homelab, and perform SDR/telecom research with (Abdullah)
- I’ve graduated with the highest GPA of the 2021 intake (3.69/4), though not officially ranked due to delayed internship completion.
Beyond the bullet points, I believe a proper introduction means telling my story from the very beginning.
I was born in 2003 and -thanks to my dad and mom- met computers when I was 4. At 5, I was already online — an experience that shaped much of who I am. Around the same time, another life-defining moment happened: my grandparents took me along to protest against the construction of a base station in our neighborhood. While most children were drawn to toys, I was fascinated by electronics, satellite receivers, antennas. That protest didn’t turn me away from telecom; instead, it ignited a lifelong curiosity.
By the time I learned to read, Wikipedia had become my closest companion. I spent countless hours browsing Turkish internet, teaching myself about (radiation), the (immune system), and of course — mobile networks and (base stations). At 11, Scratch became my first canvas for simulating computers, where I built everything from authentication systems to primitive operating environments. This was the spark of my “learning-by-doing” nature.
High school deepened this practice. I taught myself C#, OOP, and software engineering concepts directly from Visual Studio IntelliSense and university textbooks I bought on my own. Every week I found a new problem worth solving — from writing desktop apps and frameworks to experimenting with cryptography by wrapping hash functions and AES in my own libraries. Even my computer constantly crashing every 10 minutes didn’t stop me: instead, I built my own command line and GUI shells to replace what Windows lacked for me. I even designed my own programming language. These struggles taught me resilience as much as they taught me engineering.
University was a shift in perspective: I realized that technical skill alone wasn’t enough. Teamwork, leadership, and community are irreplaceable. I served as deputy chair of (our IEEE computer team), later leading the project branch of the (Software Society), and eventually taking key roles in a larger inter-university community of 2,000 students. There, I provided IT systems, infrastructure, and training — shaping not just software, but people and processes.
Since then, I’ve carried this same curiosity into everything I do: self-hosting infrastructure for myself and friends, building open-source projects like Genesis, risc-mini and ukeysuite, exploring cryptography and blockchain systems, and diving deeper into telecom and SDR research. What started as childhood fascination has grown into professional engineering, community leadership, and a relentless drive to understand — and create — the systems around me.
This story isn’t finished yet — but it’s the foundation of everything I am building next.