Current: CTO @ GensureTech

Ali Gündoğdu

I build products, grow and lead teams, and still write code now and then. Here I share ideas from inside the work, the things I try, and whatever stays on my mind along the way.

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leadership

10 min · July 16, 2026

RICE Will Not Make the Call for You. It Makes You Ask the Question You Are Avoiding.

For most people RICE is a corporate spreadsheet. Its real job is not to calculate a score, but to sit you down in front of the questions you are afraid to answer. Why I still come back to it, on a big team and as a team of one.
leadership

6 min · June 11, 2026

What Does a Founding Engineer Actually Do? The 'Founding' Is Misleading

Founding engineer is one of the most sought-after technical roles of 2025. But most people get it wrong: they are not a founder, and the job is not mostly writing code. Backed by industry data, here is what the role really involves.
leadership

17 min · June 6, 2026

Should a CTO Write Code? Stop Asking the Wrong Question

Should a CTO write code or not? The question itself is wrong. How the role changes with the company's stage, when to touch the keyboard, and when to stay away.
engineering

7 min · June 5, 2026

Is PHP Dead?

Taking the old "Is PHP dead?" question and walking it through PHP's history and its technical turns, this piece argues that it is still a living, growing language.
engineering

6 min · January 11, 2026

Data Integrity in Distributed Systems and the Debezium Call

Trying to keep several databases consistent, I hit polling, spaghetti code, and the dual write curse. The fix was to stop asking the database 'what changed' and listen to its log instead: CDC and Debezium.
engineering

6 min · January 11, 2026

Mattermost's 10,000 Message Limit and How I Moved to Matrix

One morning Mattermost put our team's memory behind a 10,000 message wall. I weighed the options honestly, moved to the Matrix protocol, and wrote my own tool for the migration.

Selected work

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Seodisias

A weekend experiment that became a real SEO tool. Crawls, audits, and surfaces what matters.

GoSEO

GeoMagnet GitHub

A weekly tradition I share with my son: visiting ancient cities and historical sites, then marking each place, exporting a 3D terrain slice (STL), and printing it on a 3D printer.

3D PrintTinkerCadFamily

TerraSTL GitHub

Open-source tool that lets you select any region on a map and export it as an STL file, ready for 3D printing. Great for custom terrain models and topographic visualizations.

3D PrintMapTerrainSTL