Melih KızmazBackend · DevOps · Product
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Backend · DevOps · Product

Melih Kızmaz

Backend & DevOps engineer, technical product manager.

I build the parts of software nobody sees and everybody feels: APIs, pipelines, clusters, and lately the plumbing that lets AI agents run in production without setting it on fire.

This is my little planet. Take a walk around.

WORK

01WORKExperience · Projects · Lab

Work

Where I’ve worked, the products I’ve built, and a lab of small systems you can break right here.

Experience

  1. 2026 →

    Backend & DevOps Engineer · NaylaLabs

    Backend services, CI/CD pipelines, Kubernetes clusters and the observability around them.

  2. 2026 →

    Technical Product Manager · Türkiye ⇄ Romania product team

    Roadmap, team rhythm and delivery for a product built across two countries — while still shipping code.

  3. 2024 →

    Co-founder & CTO · Bitnodia

    Led the build of Postgradia end to end: NestJS API, React web app, React Native mobile app, CI/CD, containers and production monitoring.

  4. 2023 – 2025

    Software Engineer · iftrue

    Fastify and NestJS services for a developer-productivity product built on DORA and SPACE metrics; Kubernetes with Helm, on-prem enterprise installs, Promtail → Loki → Grafana.

  5. 2021 – 2022

    Backend Developer · Glance Capital

    Backend for a Canadian bank’s web and mobile apps.

  6. 2021 – 2022

    Backend Developer · Bordo

    Node.js, NestJS, GraphQL, MongoDB and PostgreSQL for product teams.

  7. Before

    Mechanical Engineer · Defence industry

    Three years of quality control and production planning.

Elsewhere

Case studies

  • Live · 2024 → now

    Postgradia

    SaaS for education coaches: weekly homework planning, exam tracking and a parent view — API, web, mobile and the platform under them.

    Co-founder & CTO — backend & DevOps lead

    A coaching platform where coaches, students and parents work from the same weekly plan.

    Built with

    • NestJS
    • TypeScript
    • MikroORM
    • PostgreSQL
    • CASL
    • Passport · JWT
    • Swagger
    • React Email
  • Delivered · 2026

    3dfilamentci

    Catalogue with SEO-aware variant URLs, stock reservations, card payments and an admin with 2FA — API, storefront, admin and infra, alone.

    Sole engineer — architecture, backend, storefront, admin, infra

    An e-commerce platform for 3D printers, filament, resin and spare parts — built from scratch for a specialist shop.

    Built with

    • NestJS 12
    • TypeScript
    • TypeORM
    • PostgreSQL 18
    • Redis
    • BullMQ
    • OpenAPI
    • Next.js (App Router)
  • Live · 2026

    Mentor Z

    Weekly homework, topic tracking and exam analysis for exam coaches and their students; multi-tenant, on Workers + D1.

    Sole engineer — product, backend, frontend, Cloudflare

    A coaching panel that replaced a stack of per-grade Excel workbooks — running entirely on Cloudflare’s free tier.

    Built with

    • Hono
    • TypeScript
    • Cloudflare Workers
    • D1 (SQLite)
    • Drizzle ORM
    • Cron Triggers
    • React
    • Vite
  • Live · 2026

    Hockey Pick’em & Sub Pulse

    Scheduled jobs, idempotent scoring and privacy-first storage inside Reddit’s serverless runtime — shipped to real communities.

    Solo — design, code, policies, publishing

    Two apps on Reddit’s Developer Platform: a free-to-play hockey prediction game, and a weekly health report with alerts for moderators.

    Built with

    • Devvit Web
    • Reddit API
    • Scheduler
    • Redis
    • TypeScript
    • React
    • Vite
    • Tailwind CSS

Freelance web

All my code on GitHub

Lab

Small interactive explainers — each one a real mechanism from my work, running in your browser.

  • Load-balancing & autoscaling lab

    Stateless Under Load

    Push traffic at sticky and stateless MCP servers side by side and watch hot spots, scaling and p95 latency diverge.

  • Rate-limiting lab

    Token Bucket Arcade

    Hammer one API through three rate limiters at once and watch a fixed window get gamed, a sliding window hold the line and a token bucket soak up the burst.

  • Progressive delivery simulator

    Canary Release

    Roll v2 out to 1% → 5% → 25% → 100% of traffic, slip a bug into it, and watch automated burn-rate analysis halt the rollout before most users notice.

  • Message-queue & autoscaling lab

    Queue Under Pressure

    Flood a bounded queue with producers, starve or scale its consumers, and watch lag, backpressure, retries, poison messages and the dead-letter queue play out.

  • Circuit-breaker & retry-storm simulator

    Trip the Breaker

    Make a downstream API fail and watch naive retries turn it into a storm — then let a circuit breaker go Closed → Open → Half-open and save it.

  • Consistent-hashing playground

    The Hash Ring

    Add and remove cache nodes and count how many keys move under hash % N, a consistent-hash ring and virtual nodes — then watch one celebrity key melt a node anyway.

  • Kubernetes scheduler simulator

    Pod Tetris

    Watch kube-scheduler filter, score and bind pods onto nodes like falling blocks — with taints, affinity, a node dying and the cluster autoscaler to the rescue. Or drag the pods yourself.

02NaylaLabsSince 2026

NaylaLabs

Where I’ve worked since the start of 2026. I build backend services and look after the DevOps underneath them — pipelines, clusters, and the observability that tells you the truth.

I’m also the Technical Product Manager on a product built between Türkiye and Romania: roadmap, team rhythm, and still some code.

Five people around one long table, a lot of coffee, a box of Lego, and a few cats who think the laptops are heated beds.

03The balloon5 posts

Agent-Native Operations

Backend and DevOps infrastructure was designed around a quiet assumption: the caller is a human. AI agents break that in production. A five-part series, one mechanism at a time, every post carrying a number we measured ourselves.

04The bikeRide

A black road bike

Parked by the road. On the planet you can ride it — it comes with a radio.

05The pitchShoot

A small pitch

One ball, one goal. On the planet you can take a shot.

06The roseNorth

The rose

One rose, under glass, on a very small planet. (Antoine, thank you.)

07Two volcanoesNorth

Two volcanoes

Two volcanoes, one active. He sweeps them every morning.

08BaobabsNorth

Baobabs

Baobabs. You have to pull them while they’re small — like tech debt.

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