Taha, I think I did it again
Yesterday we had our big launch at Instruqt.
It’s been years of work. I’ve been leading the frontend through all of it, and when it finally went out, I felt something I don’t feel very often: I was genuinely proud of what we built. Not the “glad it shipped” kind of relief, but the quiet kind of pride where you look at the thing and think, yes, this is good, and I had a real part in it.
I’ve felt that exactly once before in my career.
Eight years ago
It was at my last job back in Iran, and I was working with Taha, my best friend.
Together we built a system where the backend could send a single JSON and the frontend would render a whole admin panel page from it. Forms, tables, layouts, actions, all of it. No page-specific frontend code, just a description of the page and an engine that knew how to turn it into UI.
Today, rendering UI from JSON is a pretty common practice. There are libraries for it, talks about it, whole products built around it. But back then, we didn’t have any of that. We just had a problem, a lot of late nights, and each other. We figured it out on our own, years before it became a thing everyone does.
Taha was one of the best developers I have ever worked with. He was sharp, he was fast, and he had this way of making hard problems feel like something we could just sit down and solve together. A lot of what made that system work was him. A lot of what made me believe I could build something extraordinary was him too.
Losing him
Before he was a developer, Taha was a marine engineer, working on ship engines. He gave up that life to be with the love of his life, and started over from scratch as a developer. That’s the kind of person he was.
But that previous life left something behind. Years around ship engines had damaged his lungs, and when Covid came, it hit him harder than it should have. I still think about the timing. If the vaccines had come just a little earlier, we might have had him with us for so much longer.
He went to the hospital. I exchanged a couple of last messages with him, not knowing they would be the last. Then he went into a coma, and after 16 days, he left us.
I lost my best friend to Covid in Turkey.
He’s resting in Üsküdar cemetery, in a place Elaheh and I picked for him. I designed his tombstone too. I’ve designed a lot of things in my life, but that’s a design I never thought I would have to make. Until I left Turkey, I visited him there every week.
A year after we lost him, I moved to the Netherlands. New country, new job, new life. But even now, there’s only one reason I go back to Turkey: to see my best friend again.
Somewhere along the way, I also stopped expecting to feel that kind of pride in my work again. It felt like something that belonged to that time, and to working with him.
Yesterday
Yesterday was also Taha’s birthday.
I don’t think that’s a coincidence I need to explain or make meaningful. It just is. The day I finally felt that feeling again was his day, and I couldn’t stop thinking about him.
So this is for him.
Taha, you were my best friend, and you were the one who helped me be proud of something for the first time. I wish I could show you what we launched yesterday. I wish I could hear what you’d criticize first, because you definitely would.
But I wanted you to know: I think I did it again.
Happy birthday, brother.
P.S. The photo at the top is from when Taha had just moved to Turkey. We went to Eminönü to exchange dollars to lira so he could pay for the apartment he was buying. It was supposed to be a simple exchange, something we didn’t even think twice about, but it somehow turned into a heist. That’s a story for another day, or maybe one I tell better in person.