About

Hi, I’m Aziz. I started writing software at eighteen — first year of college in Istanbul, on a Sinclair Spectrum. BASIC, Z80, tape-cassette storage. The first time I’d ever seen a real computer had been days earlier, in the display window of a shop on the commercial street I walked down on the way to my dorm. Until then, every computer I’d known was on television: room-sized, punch cards, spinning tape reels. I remember thinking: so this is what one actually looks like.

A Mac Plus came next — a single floppy, the first time I ever used Word or Excel. I saved for a second-hand Acer PC; no hard drive, just a 5.25-inch floppy and a mono screen, and eventually a 20MB PCI hard-drive card that felt like a miracle. I taught myself 8086 assembly and used it to finish calculus homework faster than my classmates. I learned C from Kernighan & Ritchie, COBOL and Fortran in class, Pascal on my own — later writing stats software for my own courses in Delphi, and utilities for the Palm III in C that I sold online, a decade before anyone called that an App Store.

My first paid work was custom software for a small company in Istanbul on an actual IBM PC/XT, dBase III+ compiled with Clipper. I wrote and sold a stock-management system in the same stack before I’d finished undergrad. I was building things before I knew what building software was supposed to look like.

The rest is mostly in my résumé. Twenty-plus years in mobile — finance (ten years at PIMCO, Citi Private Bank before that), healthcare (Canopy Health, Centene, Philips Medical a lifetime ago, and now a stealth co-founded startup), and the consumer apps you’ve probably used this week. I’ve worked on every mobile platform that’s existed: Palm, Windows Mobile, .NET CF, BlackBerry, jailbroken iPhones in 2007 before the SDK, Android, and everything since. Somewhere along the way I picked up an MBA, a CFA Level I, and a habit of writing down what I learn.

These days I’m founder-mode on several projects — a healthcare platform, an algorithmic trading system, an iOS and Android app near launch, a services marketplace, and a notebook app with an unconventional interface. I still write code every day. I still have the same instinct I had at the Acer: see what I can build.