Beyond work — Serhat Akkuş

Tennis

I play regularly, and badly enough to still be improving. Tennis is a game of recovering from your last mistake fast enough to play the next ball — which is a skill I would recommend to anyone who writes software for a living.

It is also how tenisplatformu.org came about. I joined the Çanakkale tennis community in 2023 and its admin team not long after — a community that needed better tooling than a group chat, and I happened to be the person in it who could build that. Around 120 players use the app now. Of everything on this site, it is the project I am most attached to: software that made a real thing better for people I actually see every week.

Chess

An amateur, permanently. What keeps me at the board is that chess is completely honest with you: there is no bad luck, no unfair bounce, no one else to blame. You lost because you missed something. That is an unusual thing to spend your free time volunteering for.

The most useful habit chess gave me is checking my opponent's reply before making my own move — which in software means asking what breaks, who gets paged, and what this looks like in two years, before I commit to the clever solution.

Why this is on a professional website

Because the overlap is real. Both games punish the same mistake — playing the shot you wish you had instead of the one actually in front of you — and so does building software. Most bad architecture I have seen came from designing for the system somebody hoped to have rather than the one they had.

And because if you are thinking about working with me, you probably want some sense of who you would be talking to every week. This is it: someone who likes games with no luck in them, and who will tell you what he actually thinks.

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