I’m Görkem [/ˈgøɾˈkem/] (he/him).
I’m a maker at heart,
skilled in digital fabrication, programming, and hardware design. I try to explore building alternative technologies
using open-source tools and I share what I make and how I make it online, so you can make it too!
I advocate for open-design
and publish my works on the web under open software & hardware licenses. My projects have been featured on various media outlets,
including
VICE,
Hackaday,
Raspberry Pi News,
and Arduino blog.
I'm a Physicist and Interaction Designer by training, with degrees from Bilkent University and Estonian Academy of Arts.
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About the website
This website is hand coded by human hands (mine) from scratch using HTML/CSS and JS.
I started designing this website 2017 but it went through many iterations and I've been updating it ever since.
This place is a creative canvas for me to showcase what I make online. I think of it
as my home on the internet. I design it mostly for myself, I do not consciously follow any UI/UX rules,
I just do what feels fun, interesting, or cool. So if you see something that looks weird don't call the UI/UX Police.
Like any home, it’s a living organism! It's an extension of me that is constantly shifting with the seasons,
my mood, or whatever I’m into at the time. Don’t be surprised if things
move around every now and then.
WHY?
I grew up in an era when family computer's were still a thing and the internet was full of cool websites. One of my favorite activities after school was to find a website and follow the links on it to find more interesting and cool websites. The web was made of hundreds of thousands of websites built up with passion and creative freedom, it created a web link between people, a free and open space of shared knowledge, and it was unintentional! I wanted to be a part of this community but at the time I did not have the skill to build my own website so it took a while to realize that dream!
Although the current state of online spaces feels like it's in decline, the personal web is still alive, you just have to know where to look. There's a resurgance of the old web at the moment that goes my multiple names: web revival, the indie web, small web etc. and I'm happy to be a part of it!
If you’d like to carve out your own corner on the internet, here is a link to help you get started. You can literally make anyhing you want, your imagination is the limit! Go make a website!
HOW?
High-level diagram of the current architecture of my servers.
Currently, my website is made up of two main parts: gorkem.cc and gorkyver.com
gorkem.cc is the static site you're reading this on right now. I'm using Eleventy (11ty) to make it easier to update without any server-side operation. I also use a custom workflow with GitHub Actions that builds the site on Ubuntu and transfers the files to an S3 bucket whenever the GitHub repo is updated.
gorkyver.com is hosted on a VPS(Virtual Private Server) and runs on Ubuntu 22.04 which serves as the home of my codebase, web analytics, Zotero Storage and any dynamic content I experiment with, I use NGINX in Reverse Proxy configuration in combination with Docker to serve files from that domain.
Right now, I'm in the process of migrating everything over to gorkyver.com, but it's a slow and complex process as it has a lot of moving parts. Once the migration is complete, everything will be served directly from gorkyver.com!
