Renan Çakırerk

It was a very warm summer day in the year 1990, I was 5 years old. We went shopping with my mum and sister and after the  shopping spree we had a lot of heavy shopping bags to carry back home. The problem was we had a very long way to walk back home and my mum and sis started complaining that the bags were hurting their hands. So I started thinking. I found a strong stick on the road and told my mum to hang all the bags on it so she and my sister could equally share the weight of the bags without hurting their hands by holding both ends of the stick… I remember how my mum was amazed by the idea of a 5 year old and I remember how much I enjoyed creating solutions to everyday problems. Well to be honest, I still do.

I was born in Australia / Sydney on 1985. I lived in The Republic of South Africa for a year before coming to Turkey permanently on 1991 with my mother and sister.

Innovation and creativity has always been a passion of mine. I always wanted to be a musician, a scientist, an architect and a businessman. I danced with the sound of the clock when I was 10 months old and played Ode to Joy from ear on the piano with both hands when I was 3. I helped my teachers feed other kids my age in kindergarten. I used a briefcase while going to school when I was 10 and read many “how to be successful in business and sales” books at that age. I bought my own microscope and telescope by saving my pocket money and made thousands of experiments. I filled up a notebook measuring the arrival time of the sound of every thunder every time it rained. I dug the soil everyday at school with my friend to find dinosaur bones. I read anatomy encyclopedias to memorize the name and locations of bones and muscles in our body. I’ve built many structures from objects I found around the house and tried to fix everything broken… I was a curious hyperactive kid that asked questions non-stop. At the end apparently I have became an engineer.

I have a bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering where I developed a face recognition and identification software named FaceIn by highly optimizing the Eigenface algorithm to eliminate bad lightning conditions and to correct face positions with Python and OpenCV as my graduation project. Click here for a screenshot of FaceIn.

I’m currently doing my Masters in Software Engineering at Boğaziçi University. Planning to do my PhD.

I am working as a Software Design and Development Engineer at TUBITAK / UEKAE (The National Research Institute of Electronics and Cryptology) developing Pardus Linux as a member of the Pardus Team. I am the lead developer of Kaptan, developer of YALI and author of Quickformat. I have completely designed the user interface of YALI and Kaptan for Pardus 2011 and also created the Pardus 2011 KDM and Plymouth themes.

I am an Open Source, Linux, Python, JavaScript and Qt enthusiast.

On the summer of 2010 I was a Google Summer of Code Mentor for the “WUBI-like Installer for Pardus” project. The project enabled Pardus to be installed and removed like an ordinary Windows program on Windows systems.

On 2008 I’ve won the 1st place in the world in the IEEE Student Branch Web Site Contest among 220 universities where I completely designed and programmed the web site using Photoshop, Flash,  PHP, CSS and JavaScript.

I worked as a musician at various places in The Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus as a vocalist, pianist, guitarist and bassist. I like composing music and covering songs in my mini home studio whenever I have time.

Additionally,

I also worked as a user interface / graphics designer at Mynet, the number one web portal in Turkey where I completely designed the user interfaces of the ICQ, traffic and chat services.

Nowadays I am very interested in photography and willing to open a personal display in Istanbul..