Eralp Bayraktar

I've published two open-source Django libraries to solve the challenges that I personally face during my daily tasks. I also documented/blogged about the challenges, how I made the engineering decisions in the library, and how people can use it.

First is Django-function-caching, it explains how to cache the right way. Second is a Django-rotate-secret-key which allows you to rotate your secret keys without causing inconvenience for your users.

You can find a detailed analysis on my personal blog.

In under 24 hours, I created a very simple website which allowed people to virtually invest in cryptocurrencies.

Each user after opening an account is credited 10,000 virtual US dollars and they are then allowed to buy/sell cryptocurrencies. The fun part of it is that it is social. Everyone is allowed to track everyone else's moves and there is a weekly/all-time leaderboard.

Technologies: Django, CoinMarketCap API

I coded an internal tool for Rhino Runner to create tasks that will allow them to track user reviews/interactions for specific keywords/brands on Twitter.

The difficulty of this task was that Rhino Runner needed to track many keywords/hashtags and Twitter obviously employs rate-limiting for clients to crawl too much data.

The way I handled this was to prioritize tasks in a smart manner. If a hashtag doesn't get much interaction, no need to crawl it every hour if the system is approaching its maximum rate-limit. Moreover, one also cannot wait too much otherwise tracking is useless (if they are notified of a tweet one week later, it is useless). It posed an engineering challenge to find the best trade-off.

I used Django and Twitter API with Celery and Redis for the task queue.

A Chrome Extension/Cross-platform Application

Video Demonstration:
· https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYLwQmcSwqk

Scan and unlock web pages securely!

Welcome to ObiKey, your secure identity vault in your pocket. Want to use different passwords for each website but don't want to put your data on the cloud? Use ObiKey. 0 data on the cloud. Full control in your hands.

Tired of inputting the same information to multiple websites? Use ObiKey to transfer this information securely from your pocket to your browser.

Go to a website and with the help of "ObiKey Helper" extension generate a QR code, scan this code with your phone and share one of your identities to this web page. ObiKey will remember this forever and suggest to use the same identity, next time you visit the website.

Technologies: Ionic, JavaScript Library, Node.js

Code Repositories:
· https://github.com/EralpB/ObiKeyServer
· https://github.com/EralpB/ObiKeyIonic
· https://github.com/EralpB/ObiKey.js

I realized that there was a gap in mobile application quality in the leading classified advertisements in the Turkish market and decided to develop a cross-platform application. This application allows a user to sign up and create their ads in a couple of clicks, it also allows in-app messaging.

Technologies: Firebase, Ionic, Django

As a contractor, I developed 32gun.com for a prominent Turkish news company. Besides the website, I also delivered the iOS and Android applications through subcontracting.

The heavy focus on videos posed some challenges e.g., the need to encode the videos in different qualities (360p, 720p, and so on). Another critical feature was to enable a live stream via authorized smartphones.

Thanks to the Wowza media server, I could solve the domain problems, like specific encodings and scaling, by utilizing correct HTTP headers to cache the content. An AWS environment can scale really well and the video content is perfectly cachable as it doesn't change per-user basis. This offloaded an enormous amount of work from the application server.