In 2010, during my first year of high school, we had to choose academic tracks that would eventually determine our college majors. My mother was doing her best to keep us afloat with the retirement benefits from my father, whom we had lost seven years prior. The payments we received were even below the minimum wage, as my dad had retired early due to cancer. In addition to our financial struggles, my physical limitations severely restricted the colleges I could realistically consider. We still lived in the rural town on the European side of Türkiye where my parents met, and educational opportunities remained limited.

My mother insisted on switching to remote education, even though I was the top student in my school. Math and physics exams became a struggle for us, not because they were difficult, but because I couldn’t hold a pen to write down the solution. Instead, my mother had to write down what I dictated. Try solving a polynomial equation with your mom—it was more painful than challenging. To avoid teaching differential equations to my mother, I was considering a path in social sciences. Unlike a pen, I could utilize a keyboard to type on a computer. However, in the 2010s, I wasn’t allowed to use computers in high school exams, and I don’t even remember exactly why. Regardless, I had to succeed in school by answering questions on physical papers before I could get a job that only required typing on a computer. Thus, becoming a movie translator or an historian made sense to me at the time. I believed one of those jobs would be enough for me to survive.

I started translating the news about Lil Wayne from English to Turkish for a local fan page. I made even $10 by doing so. However, I was too slow. Due to Cerebral Palsy, I had almost no wrist or finger control. Instead, I had to press the keyboard with my elbows. It was allowing me to use a personal computer functionally but quite slower than an average user. In the text translation business, they were paying you for the pages you worked on. Therefore, I could easily calculate my expected income given my typing speed. The rate was terrible. Becoming an historian, on the other hand, was not promising much either. Yet, I generalized the formula from the translation, I needed to maximize my income from my typing given that my typing speed was fixed. I searched the web for the most valuable texts I could produce. Paperwork for law was an option in theory. But, it was dependent on too many factors to become a lawyer in Turkiye around that time. I could write fiction books as another option. Becoming an author did not sound like a job either.

During my investigation into the most valuable texts I could produce, I came across programming languages. I have to emphasize that we were in a rural area in Türkiye in 2010, and at the time, we knew nothing about the dot-com bubble or the new landscape of startups. In fact, I only got internet access at home around 2008, while the world was already transitioning to mobile. Because of this, I found out about the value of programming in a rather indirect way: by searching for the most valuable languages. Regardless, the math was perfect. I realized I could type far less text to build software and earn a lot more money. I immediately started searching tech forums to learn more about the sector. They said I didn’t even need a degree to get paid, as long as I knew the hottest languages. As a teenager with physical limitations, I also fell in love with the efficiency of loops and methods, which dramatically reduced the amount of code required to type. To me, coding itself felt like a game rather than work. Crucially, it was promising income, too. The opportunities felt endless—I could make games, websites, and desktop applications; I could work for banks, tech companies, or even for the government; and I could even work from home. I thought being a programmer was the most suitable job for me given my physical limitations.

I remembered that I had installed Python first, so my first “Hello World” program was in Python 2.7. However, the forums suggested that Python was too high-level, and that one should rather go with C++ to truly understand the fundamentals of software development. I wanted exactly that. I started searching for ways to learn C++. My English wasn’t strong enough yet, and online courses weren’t widely available either—it was the year Udemy was just founded. By chance, I found the recording of a night class by a Turkish instructor named Necati Ergin, who teaches C++ to those who already know the C language. The video set was uploaded to Rapidshare and the links were shared on a tech forum. This was an incredible stroke of luck: over 150 hours of C++ recordings, all in Turkish, and taught by a legendary instructor. Even though the course was never meant for public release and was intended for an audience already familiar with the C language, I was able to learn the basics of programming and almost every principle of object-oriented programming. I binge-watched the entire course in two weeks, consuming ten hours per day. I was a diligent student, trying every instruction on my computer after each session and completing the assigned exercises. In fact, I just reviewed my email history and found that I actually emailed the instructor back then, expressing my deep gratitude for the course. He admired my ambition and promised me more resources. Unfortunately, I lost his attention after a few emails. Perhaps I was too young and uneducated to properly request mentorship, or maybe he was simply too busy with Forex. Regardless, I still respect and admire his efforts in the C community in Türkiye. He is one of the greatest tutors in Türkiye, having taught thousands of students despite not being in academia. In those years, I continued to study C++ and developed several desktop applications, mostly puzzle games to show off my skills to my friends. However, I was still too focused on traditional thinking to search for online work or publish something that could make money. Instead, I was focused on figuring out which major in my track was closest to computer science, as there were serious obstacles for me to score enough points on the necessary exams to study it. It had to take a few more years for me to receive meaningful guidance and eventually land in the computer science major.

The emergence of agentic AIs that build entire applications from mere prompts has fundamentally reshaped the tech landscape. Yet, the core calculation that first drew me to coding remains precisely the same. Having since transitioned to camera-based cursor control, earned a Ph.D. in computer science, and spent years in the Bay Area leading over 50 Gen Z developers, my professional focus is still on maximizing the value of limited output, whether I am writing task descriptions in Jira or making clarifications on Slack. Agentic AIs amplify productivity exponentially, but that volume is meaningless without consistent unit value. We must decisively prioritize the realized value of our production over sheer volume. The demand for that value is, and always will be, the primary determinant of success.