So long TUBITAK

It’s been almost 9 years that I’ve joined this institute and it came to an end. It’s time to do something new for me, therefore, I bid farewell to my friends from TUBITAK Space Technologies Research Institute.

I thought it would be nice to summarize what I’ve done during this period. There are many things that I learned here and many things that we achieved as an institute. 4 satellite projects, 2 platform projects, 1 data-sharing platform, and many scientific papers, etc. Being with such an amazing team helped me a lot with my growth.

In my first years in TUBITAK, my main duty was helping operations of RASAT which was just deployed into orbit in 2011. My first software project was developing a modem-switch configuration software for RASAT. I am very happy (also surprised) that software is still in production and still being used w/o modification :) In 2012 I worked on Gokturk-2 satellite and helped the team by developing mission planning software and image processing software. I spent too much time on automatic satellite command list generation for Gokturk-2. I learned a lot of things about satellites while doing this task. Although it seemed very hard at the beginning, I was enjoying working on this task. It took 2 years to complete these two software projects. After I started to work on the payload configuration software of the TURKSAT-6A satellite and after a while, I started to work on IMECE’s ground station software as a senior engineer. I made tremendous amounts of design decisions and I’m very happy with the outcome of the effort.

We were 2 software engineers at the beginning and we grow to 12 engineers in our team. While developing the software for the satellites, we also developed software development processes and created an agile culture that could live in a waterfall environment. Since the satellite project is being developed with the waterfall process model, we needed to achieve that. And I’m glad we could do it. From now on, I will support my friends with my best wishes and I believe they will be very successful in the oncoming challenges!

So, what’s next?!

As always, I would like to hear your thoughts about this post. If you want to share with me, you can find me on twitter.