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İD
Istanbul, Türkiye

I turn ideas
into working
products.

Full-stack developer.

Three years of writing code, shipping products, and occasionally taking things apart just to understand how they work. Lately: AI, education technology and developer tooling.

Portrait of İlyas Dal
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01 / Manifesto

Software isn't writing code to me; it's chasing a problem.

Designing how it gets solved, building the system, deploying it, and watching people actually use it — that is the best part of the job. Rather than specialising in a single layer, I like being everywhere from the idea to the infrastructure. The fastest way to understand something is to build it.

BUILD
SHIP
LEARN
BREAK
FIX
repeat
02 / Selected Work

Let the things I've built
do the talking.

04 projects — 2023 → now
01Founder / Product / Engineering

Mentora

An AI-native education platform. It rethinks how students, teachers, coaches and institutions work with AI from the ground up: assistant, homework and quiz flows, teacher workflows, analytics, gamification, institution management and model routing.

  • AI Assistant
  • Analytics
  • Model Routing
  • Institution Management
MentoraVisual pending
02Open Source / Developer Tools / AI

Atlas

The terminal, rethought for developers. Split panes, AI workflows, file management, system information and tooling in a single workspace. Open-source at the core, ecosystem on top.

  • Terminal
  • AI Workflows
  • OSS Core
AtlasVisual pending
03Developer Tooling / AI / Security

Kerberos CLI

An AI-assisted audit CLI that watches a project continuously, catches likely security issues, reports them and proposes fixes. An attempt at making security part of the pipeline instead of a separate job.

$ kerberos scan .
→ 128 files scanned · 3 findings · 2 suggestions
Kerberos CLIVisual pending
04SaaS / Full Stack / AI

ResumeUp

An AI-assisted editor for resumes that make it through ATS. The user only writes; the system handles formatting, keywords and structure.

  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • Drizzle
  • Neon
  • TipTap
ResumeUpVisual pending
03 / Lab

A shelf of
unfinished things.

Not everything has to become a product. Some of these were only ever answering a question.

  • SentoraSelf-hosted panel
  • TaskMonMonitoring
  • SkillForgeLearning experiment
  • QR menu systemDozens of restaurants
  • Homelab / self-hostingInfrastructure
  • Automation scriptsOngoing
04 / Now

What am I
working on?

builder-log — updated
  • Building Mentora's product and infrastructure
  • Writing the open-source core of Atlas
  • Testing AI agent workflows on my own projects
  • Running small experiments in developer tooling
  • Helping interesting products as a freelancer
  • Next: more open source, fewer tabs.
05 / Story
3 years

Spent writing code by hand and delivering freelance work. I have always learned through projects rather than around them.

Dozens

Of restaurants run on a QR menu system I built. That is where I first learned what “real users” actually means.

End to end

From interface to server. Linux, Docker, CI/CD — I want to understand the place a product actually runs.

Founder

Not closing tickets, but deciding where the product goes. Mentora is the largest attempt at that so far.

06 / Toolbox

Tools change.
Shipping doesn't.

Frontend

  • React
  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • Tailwind
  • Vue

Backend

  • Node.js
  • NestJS
  • Fastify
  • Hono

Data

  • PostgreSQL
  • Supabase
  • MongoDB
  • Drizzle
  • Prisma

Infra

  • Docker
  • Linux
  • GitHub Actions
  • Cloudflare
  • nginx
  • Terraform
  • Ansible

AI

  • OpenAI
  • Gemini
  • Claude
  • AI Agents
  • LLM Orchestration
07 / Open Source

Code isn't only product, sometimes it's contribution.

Most of the tools I rely on were written by someone else for free. Paying that back runs through the same place.

See on GitHub
16
Public repos
3
Languages
2023
Building since
08 / Principles

Principles

01Make something that works first.A perfect plan does not beat a working prototype.
02Complexity is your problem, not the user's.If the interface is calm, the inside is allowed to be hard.
03Code that isn't deployed is unfinished code.Localhost promises nobody anything.
04The way to understand something is to build it.Reading is the start. Building is the learning.
05Attach to problems, not tools.Frameworks come and go. The question stays.
09 / Contact

Are you
building something?

Product, software, AI, or just a good idea. We can talk — you do not need a project budget to get a reply.

I read every message and reply personally, usually within two working days.

Your details are emailed to me and never stored in a database, shared, or added to a mailing list.

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