Volkan Özçelik

performance engineer, speaker, writer

About Me

Currently, I’m a Technical Lead at Cisco , focusing on front-end performance.

As an engineer, I solve problems: The context, the origin, or the nature of the problems are orthogonal to the approaches I take in solving them.

My Passion

I believe in the beauty of simplicity ( both in code and also in design).

I am a performance enthusiast.

My passion is to create fast, responsive, intuitive interfaces, tools, and applications that millions love and use.

While doing all these, I love to write an amazingly well-organized JavaScript too.

Always Curious

It’s curiosity that matters. Or, asking the right questions, forming ideas, refining those ideas based on measurements and evidence.

The solution is just a side effect of curiosity.

So far, I’ve created mobile and web front-ends; built desktop and mobile apps; played with SQL/NoSQL/GraphQL data stores; automated the deployment of microservices, played with serverless applications, used real-time databases, streams, websockets, protocol buffers, lambda functions and message queues, crafted solutions to improve scalability and performance of both front end, and also back-end systems…

Some call this being a “ full stack developer”, or a “ unicorn developer”.
I love unicorns: Yet, don’t call myself as such.

I Cast

Nowadays I’m more into creating tutorials and screencasts .

Why not books, but videos instead?—Because, I feel like times have changed, and we’ve started to prefer to consume audiovisual content to reading books.

I find this trend towards preferring audiovisual content to books sad. Yet, we can only embrace it, as it’s a side effect of our progressive evolution. Maybe books will become more visual, and more interactive in the near future; who knows.

Nowadays, the majority of my “free” time goes to JavaScript: from zero to hero .
Other than that, I screencast on bytesized.tv .
And I also podcast once or twice a month.

I Talk

When I talk, I love to talk about…

Performance Engineering;
Widgets, APIs, Microservices;
And JavaScript!

Here are some of the talks I’ve given so far:: Scaling Your Node.JS API Like a Boss; The Secrets of High Performance Mobile JavaScript Applications; The Modern Hacker’s Guide to The Universe; Mobile Application Performance Tips; Efficient JavaScript; JavaScript Widget Development Best Practices

Though, recently I started speaking less at conferences because, nowadays, I am focusing more on creating lessons, screencasts, and podcasts about how to be a good JavaScript developer in particular and how to be a good developer in general.

Why? Because although creating screencasts take a lot of time, when you compare it to prepping for a tech talk, they are a breeze:

It takes just a fraction of the time and energy that I spend on a conference prep.
I can do it on my own schedule, so it is less stressful.
I can revise and edit things even after I deliver them.

Though I miss the stage. Constantly.

The adrenaline rush of being on the stage, connecting with the community, exchanging ideas with other speakers, and getting feedback from the audience: That’s priceless!

Being a public speaker is the most awesome and the most terrifying experience that you’ll live simultaneously.

Everyone must do it at least once in their life.

I love to talk! And the first instant I find the extra time to add a tech talk prep to my agenda, I’ll rush back on the stage!

I may also become a developer advocate (which also is something that I’m seriously thinking about) then I can find much more time to be on the stage too, as it will be part of my job to be there—That actually fits really well with my character.

So we’ll see how it goes 😉.

I {[Code]}

Oh, by the way, I am a relentless side projector.

Most of my side projects are open source
and I maintain them either under my personal GitHub account,
or under the Byte-Sized JavaScript organization’s GitHub account.