I work with AI the way I used to work with engines.

For three and a half years at Borusan Cat I was a field service technician on diesel and gas generator sets — Caterpillar, Olympian, MWM — doing preventive maintenance, troubleshooting, overhaul and commissioning on site, usually with a customer’s operation stopped and waiting. That work shaped how I think: read the symptoms, form a hypothesis, test it, and don’t guess when someone else’s downtime is the cost.

I started programming in 2020 and kept it as a serious side interest through my studies and my years in the field. In early 2025 it became my main focus — especially the open-source and local side of AI: running LLMs on my own hardware, building agents and retrieval systems over private documents, image generation, and whatever new tooling appears month to month. I follow this space daily and I learn by building, not by collecting certificates.

I’m not a software engineer by training. What I’m good at is putting these tools to work on real problems — getting a capable model running where the data can’t leave the building, automating work people are still doing by hand, and explaining the result to someone who doesn’t care how it works, only whether it works. I spent years being that person on the other side.

Alongside this I design in SolidWorks and Fusion 360 and have done a lot of 3D printing — from CAD model to finished part. Today I can go from an idea to a printed part entirely offline, with AI filling the gap where hand modelling used to stop me.

I build games, apps and AI tools under my own studio, Calkap Labs. I’m looking for hands-on work in applied AI — full-time, part-time or project-based.