Alper Ortac

Career

Engineer, founder, consultant

Professionally, I worked both in small startups and tech giants like Cisco. Started as Frontend engineer with strong opinions and a knack for sharing knowledge. Started to lead small to big teams and being responsible for product goals and coordinated execution.

I'm a freelance consultant. Working with fund tax compliance, intelligent traffic start-ups and robotics companies.

alp:feat/coding → mainMerged

Coding

#7

Nowadays I primarily code in Typescript. Depending on the task I also use Python and Rust. Always choose the right tool for the job. Most of the time that involves spinning up Tanstack and self-hosting it on one of my Hetzner VPS.

Even in the age of LLM's I'm still driven by following good coding practices. The art of crafting an elegant solution to a complex problem just makes me happy. A good session is when I'm fully locked in and ship a new version at the end.

cilinttests

Tech Stack

u03

I self-host as much as I can to avoid serverless horrors (serverlesshorrors.com). Hetzner Cloud is the best compromise between cost, performance and value. What's running on it?

Coolify to spin up my web apps
Windmill to orchestrate data pipelines (for millions of movies and tv shows)
CrateDB for big data
Convex for realtime data
MongoDB for raw data (from scraping)
Redis for Pub/Sub and caching
SpacetimeDB for my browser game

For some services I still rely on cloud software:

Posthog for analytics
Grafana for monitoring
Namecheap for Emails

When I spin up a new web apps, I usually build it with Tanstack Start, Tailwind and Convex.

claude coderun 07

AI

thought for 6s

readsrc/data/topics.ts

grep"agentic workflow"

edittopics.ts (+4 −1)

I love coding in my free time. Usually I use Claude Code to build my side projects. The pre-AI era feels so far away already, it's difficult to imagine to ever write everything by hand again. That also means that I'm constantly on the verge to optimize my agentic coding workflow.

I open sourced my Claude Code setup as a plugin because I genuinely think it has some unique qualities. First of all, it automatically classifies each task by complexity: S, M, L or XL. It then spawns an appropriate number of subagents to do research, planning, execution and reviewing.

Check it out:

Claude Code is my main driver and it costs me $200 per month. It's well worth it because it gets so much done for me. I created a page to share more details about their AI stack (aistack.to). It grows into a nice community of like-minded builders.

done · 3 tools · 12.4k tokens

❯ ask a follow-up…

claude ▾

Finance

I started 2016 with investing in stocks, ETF's and crypto. A very bumpy road, and I learned a lot in the process about trading psychology and strategies to cope with FOMO and FUD. I'm much more Zen than I was before.

I believe in portfolio diversification. Got some bucks in ETF's, stocks and crypto. I mostly invest in tech because i'm knowlegable in that field, but also in other areas.

Even held a presentation about this topic, but beware - it's in German.

Trading-Strategien und Psychologie

Family

the five of usKODAK·GOLD

Family. Love my wife and three kids. They are the reason I stay motivated to grow as a person. I'm proud of our relationship. Trust, friendship and closeness is what I experienced as a kid from my parents and I'm trying to offer the same to my family.

I like Magic the Gathering. Created an app that helps me building decks, printing them and playing with my kids.

boarding passAO 27

routeTHAISRMEXGRDEURJPN '27

Travel

Exploring other countries and cultures is an absolute joy to me. We love to visit places with different culture, history and climate. We went to Thailand, Isreal, Mexico, Grenada and all over Europe. There is so much more to see.

My favorite moments are when we witness the raw reality of what a place is about. Touristic attractions can be fun, but I mean the actual land and people. Geocaching is a great tool to find the best local spots - even in your home town.

Next destination: Japan 2027.

Movies & TV

I watched more than a thousand movies and shows, at least those that I can remember. I love intricate stories, unique visuals and immersive worlds. Kind of similar of what I value in a good game.

My all time favorites are The Matrix (too bad they never made any sequels), Fight Club and Breaking Bad. I like dark humor, epicness and unexpected twists.

I built GoodWatch because I didn't want to go to IMDB, Metacritic, Rotten Tomatoes and JustWatch every single time when I was contemplating what to watch next. It became my biggest side project and is now a personalized recommendation engine for each user's personal taste.

ALL-TIME FAVORITES

Games

I played many games. Spent countless hours with simulations, arcade, jump'n'run, shooters, RTS and indie games. If you like Duke Nukem, Gordon Freeman, Jade, Kerrigan, Guybrush Threepwood or Scorpion, we can be friends.

The THPS 2 soundtrack is still on my rotation.

I'm in the exploration phase to build the very first massive multiplayer coop game. you build a pyramid together with thousands of other players. it might it turn out that you were part of something very different.

currently playing Witcher 3 (yep i never finished it) and expedition 33. next up is probably Baldurs gate 3

Music

I'm into music that radiates infinite energy. From Metalcore, over Progrock to Liquid D'n'B and Tech House. Loudness and high production value spurs me.

If it's well produced and expertly played, there are good chances that I'll like it regardless of the genre.

275k scrobbles since 2006

Last.fm

Spotify