We've been on a hiring streak, and we would love to introduce the newest members to the team. First up: Inanc Gumus, k6 maintainer. Inanc joined in September. The k6 Open Source team is now a team of six: Nedyalko Andreev, Ivan Mirić, Ivan Palladino, Mihail Stoykov, Olha Yevtushenko, and now Inanc.
Inanc lives in Istanbul, Turkey, with his wife and two daughters. He describes himself as an introvert who's not shy. You may know him from Twitter, his YouTube Channel "Learn Go Programming", or his blog. Inanç also has a popular repository on Github if you want to learn Go.
What made you join k6 / Grafana Labs?
I have experience in designing and testing scalable software. I'm also interested in enhancing the lives of people who create reliable software. k6 does just that: help people create reliable and scalable products using a load testing tool and SaaS for engineering teams. k6 / Grafana Labs is a remote-only company and creates a lot of products in the open-source software space, two more arguments that convinced me to join.
What's your background?
I've been a programmer for 30 years. After seeing the kid next door plays a game on his TV, I got an Atari 2600. Then I sold my Atari and bought a PC with an 80286 processor, 4MB RAM, 40MB HDD instead. Around that time, I read the MS-DOS 5.1 book (500 pages or so) in a single night. The week after, I read K&R's C book and started tinkering with the machine. I learned a lot, created games, hacked games, and created utility programs for my friends.
Around 1993, my brother and I developed a website called Gamebase eXtreme (using ASP). We convinced dozens of people to write for us and receive free games we created in return. The website became popular, and I learned that I could make money with programming. I started at a web development shop in 1999.
In 2003, I started working for a global advertising company. There I created an Internet advertisement server in C#. Then I received a competing offer and co-founded a company that used machine-learning to semantically categorize webpages (using Java). We sold that company, only to start another "AdTech" company using deep-learning. After a while, I got bored of that space and returned to consulting.
I learned Go for one such consulting gig, and decided to create a blog to teach others about the Go language, and it became pretty popular. I created an online course and open-sourced the repository for the course. And here we are, I guess.
What are you currently working on?
I'm currently working on maintaining and improving the k6 open-source code base. Like, I'm implementing GRPC Reflection API for k6 so that k6 scripts can call GRPC services without proto files. I'm also refactoring some parts of the k6 code to improve the experience for folks contributing.
What do you do outside of work?
I enjoy teaching. I best learn something when I teach it. So, I make a lot of animations and write a lot while doing so.
I'm a home barista and have a relatively decent espresso (semi-manual) machine at home. I enjoy all kinds of espresso and import & try various coffee beans from around the world.
I play games. My favorite genres are RPG, FPS, and RTS games. I started programming when I was 9 on an old MS-DOS machine because I wanted to develop my own games.
I read a lot. Mostly non-fiction books about popular science: Space physics (black holes, origins of the universe, etc.), biology (often about evolution), future technologies, sociology, psychology, marketing, startups, etc.
When it comes to movies, time travel, aliens, and zombies are my favorite topics. I'm also a huge fan of the Supernatural TV series.
I listen to (alternative) rock, alternative folk, and sometimes electronic music.
Do you have anything exciting coming up?
I'm currently writing a book about writing Idiomatic Code in Go for Manning Publishing. So I guess keep your eyes peeled for that one!
If you want to know how Inan spent his first week, he wrote a DSL on top of the k6 HTTP API during his "Week of Testing".