Don't reduce yourself to a single function

Notes from my TEDxAFLYouth talk for high-school students, October 2026. I am a computer engineer, but I talked about other things: art, stories, insects, a grumpy typewriter, a dress trying to find its identity, and a building that looks at the Moon at night. They sound unrelated — at least that is what I thought at your age.

As a child I loved maths and olympiad problems, but I also read so much that my primary-school teacher once called my mother to say I should read less or I would ruin my eyes. My mother was an art teacher; I grew up among painters' books and her sketches. Later I chose computer engineering because I loved computers and was good at maths — and only years later understood that being good at something does not mean you must do only that for the rest of your life.

Today, almost everything I once thought was separate — novels, my mother's art books, drawing, foreign languages, computer games, maths, physics, code, fashion, theatre, cinema — has found its place in my work. The point is not to collect as many skills as possible. It is to notice where your curiosity goes, and not to prune it too early. Two things that look completely unrelated today might, ten years from now, be the two halves of something only you can make.

And find the people and places that don't reduce you to a single function either. İskele47 was such a place for me.