2026 is definitely the year of blogging for me. I already published twice as many posts as I did last year. Last Friday I published a post in my technical blog in the same vein as this post: a reflection on the week. Today I posted another one there about the women who shaped me in my career. Happy Women’s Day to all women around the world!
I’m writing this while my neighborhood is under siege by law enforcement. There’s a bunch of police officers in every corner just because the women of Istanbul want to have a rally to celebrate March 8, express their anger and mourn the losses of their fellow sisters who were killed by men.
This was a really busy week. I worked more than 8 full-focus hours every
single weekday. This means I probably spent more than 10 hours in front of the
computer. It’s a lot! Thankfully this week was a 4-day week so I had time to
rest.
On Friday I spent the whole day working on my sculpture. The bust is coming
along. I decided to do something strange (as I usually do) and make it half
female and half male. I don’t know how I will do the transition smoothly in the
middle of the face but we’ll see.
This is the 8th week since I created hypersubject.net. The effects of this experiment are already tangible. Compared to last year, I have already spent twice as many hours working on my blog(s) and nearly half that time writing even though we are only two months into 2026. I have already published 12 posts this year, which is far more than my total output for all of 2025.
I find myself once again yearning for a digital community. I believe the future of social media (for me) is some kind of invite-only group chat where the conversation flows like a river. It might live in Discord, Slack or even IRC, I don’t care1. Physical community is important but as a millennial I need text-based friendships too.
On Friday, I got a message from kerey on WhatsApp saying that “there is a need for a non-normie consortium”. It triggered a long conversation about the normie/non-normie dichotomy and whether this type of distinction is elitist or not. I collected my thoughts on this in Against the Non-Normie.
At the beginning of this year, I decided to merge all things I wrote in different corners of the internet. After 5 weeks of that experiment, I decided otherwise. My old writings are worthy in their respective contexts. Visitors of this blog are probably not interested in technical posts about Kubernetes nor political posts about Turkey. And I am not interested in writing about them here.
So, my Turkish writing will continue in bengidoom.com and technical posts in ege.dev. Deciding this was a relief—I don’t need to carry the baggage of old writings here. hypersubject.net is the home of a different persona of mine. A persona that I can use to be more personal and honest on the internet. A persona who can regularly hit publish.
Richard Stallman had a Marxian effect on technology in the 1980s. He started
the Free Software movement. His ideas mobilized a vast number of programmers
and the ideology he initiated still has a great gravity in the software
ecosystem. Since the year 2000, thousands of developers travel to Brussels
every February like pilgrims for Free and Open Source Software Developers'
European Meeting (FOSDEM). I am proud to be among the pilgrims for the second
year in a row.
Weekends feel busier than weekdays lately. Time flew, and I just noticed that I didn’t manage to finish this week’s post. This was bound to happen. It’s okay. Shhh… it’s okay. IT’S OKAY! Discipline is not punching yourself into the mold of a wireheaded soldier. Discipline is the ability to flow around, between, and through various slip-ups. Discipline is persistently looking at the horizon. Okay, I needed this pep talk.
I started my first bust this week. The number of details on a human face is crazy. And what’s hard about reflecting all those details on the clay is not the technique but actually noticing them. Making art requires a lot of noticing. Noticing requires giving a fuck. You need to give a fuck to create something. But too much of it can also paralyze you. There’s a fine balance between giving a fuck and letting go and allowing yourself to create something messy.
I finally did it. I finally found a tutor for sculpting. Actually, what I found is much bigger than just a tutor. I found a workshop, a collective, a mirage in the middle of the desert. Actually… in the middle of an industrial zone.
On Friday I went to OtonomArt for an introductory sculpting class. I made this relief with mud:
Starting next week I’ll go there twice a week. Finally I have a space for sculpting and hopefully will have a regular practice throughout the year. I am going to enter 2027 as a sculptor.
2025 was a good year for me. After quitting my startup, which was going nowhere, at the end of 2024, I entered 2025 rejuvenated. As a result I read more, experimented more, travelled more, did more… I feel like 2025 was a stepping stone for 2026.
What I was up to in the first week of 2026?
hypersubject.net
My online presence is highly fragmented.
I have a personal and “professional” web site at https://ege.dev where I mostly post my technical writings. I also have a content type that I call “beats” which are unlisted, they only show up in the RSS feed. I was using beats to post short form updates that are usually personal. I have a photo gallery at that site as well.
