Who Am I?

I was born in the winter of 1982 in Istanbul, Turkey and lived in a small town in the Cappadocia region until I was 12 years old. In year 1994 passed the national exam to study in a special state school as a boarding student. As a (proud) graduate of Kadikoy Anatolian Mid and High School (Old Science College), in 2002 I’ve got accepted to study Economics as a major and Statistics as a minor at Istanbul University.

While I was studying, I started working as a financial controller. That’s where I gained experience in finance, accounting and controlling and put it on top of my knowledge in economics and statistics. With my interest in programming, meanwhile I’ve also started to learn VBA and SQL on my own. Eventually, I automated the whole controlling system down to the click of a button. This led to an offer to work as a consultant in the Microsoft Business Intelligence department in year 2006.

As a Business Intelligence Consultant I’ve built many data warehouses with (but not limited to) Microsoft Stack and participated in every step of an end-to-end Business Intelligence lifecycle including DWH, ETL, OLAP & Reporting design. Throughout my consulting career, I’ve completed more than 40 projects in 30 different companies (mostly global) across 5 major industries including retail, pharmaceuticals, automotive, finance and telecommunications. Most of these projects were very complex and always had a new method/technology as part of the learning curve.

For over four years, I developed software applications for Windows and Web (.NET stack) including B2C systems (with 8 million direct users), B2B and Intranet applications (mainly in retail companies) and Customer Data Platform (CDP) systems including operations like Customer Data Cleansing, Segmentation, Clustering, Marketing Campaigns, Loyalty Programme Management, Refer and Earn Programmes.

I am simply the combination of economics, statistics, business intelligence, data, software development and deep industry/domain/business knowledge and project management skills.

I am currently living in Düsseldorf, Germany together with my wife and our 4 cats 🙂