Taha Darendeli studied Computer Science at Ozyegin University, Istanbul. Towards my graduation, I decided to continue my career in iOS Engineering which is my passion since teenager times. Designing interfaces and making technologies that people can hold on their hands excites me a lot since then.
After working on some student start ups, I started working for Medrics Healthcare solution where we were targeting indoor navigation systems for massive buildings and the target audience was hospitals by its nature. Navigation systems helped me to understand many real life engineering solutions and we had to overcome different sets of problems at that stage. Working on field tests was exciting and working with actual clients was a huge experience for myself.
After my graduation I decided to start my first corporate journey on OBSS(Open business Software Solutions) as iOS Engineer and consulted Akbank in Istanbul. Just before Covid-19 outbreak hit the world and sent everyone working from home I had a brief few months of experience working from the office with a massive team. Working for a bank brings its own responsibilities and as a newly graduated engineer, I had to keep up with the team to deliver our products. In Akbank, I was a member of the wealth team and we were migrating our app from the old interface with Objective-C codebase to the new award-winning UI and Swift codebase. Experience that I gained from Akbank is so valuable in my personal improvement.
Corporate life and Akbank journey had to come to an end in favor of another exciting step of my professional life, Getir! Getir was a Turkish startup with purple colors around. They were a young team in terms of average employee age scale which makes me feel better working with fresh minds and new technologies. Colleagues become more of your friends this way. Apart from Getir being a ultra fast grocery delivery company originally, defining themselves as a tech company really caught my attention and in a short while the company reached +10 billion valuation which we call decacorn. It was an amazing experience to witness such growth and balancing teams to not block each other was an important experience for me.
At some point in your professional life you need to take risks, sometimes it pays off, sometimes it doesn’t. However, for my own ambitions I decided to take the challenge and stepped up my game to international level. Luckily all the process went smoothly with Auto Trader UK and I moved to Manchester, England. However there was a bigger challenge that I didn’t realise before joining AT which was their tech stack. Team was working on a backend driven UI and I had to deliver products using Kotlin backend. I had no experience neither on Kotlin, nor backend development. However rather than iOS Engineering, I took it as a Software Engineering challenge. Without being a good Software Engineer, you cannot be a good iOS Engineer and I think it is safe to call it parent – child relation between them.
I consider myself succeeding my challenge on AT however my passion is more of iOS Engineering which you build apps natively on iDevices. As a result, I decided to take another step in my career and joined Roku UK. Roku is a streaming company from the US which has offices here in the UK as well. Roku also has smart home devices which are currently only available in the US and I am working on their mobile app. Everyday we have to solve critical technical challenges which drives me to achieve more with the team.
My story still continues with Roku and the next chapter will lay ahead of my professional career. I am still discovering new skills of mind and improving my engineering skills. As long as I provide nice looking, useful and bug-free apps I will stay as a happy engineer.