Alkan Zilgir,
building full-stack
web apps.

The problem. I wanted to learn Laravel properly by building something I'd actually open every week, not a tutorial todo list. Personal finance was the excuse.

What I built. Eloquent models with real migrations and constraints, budget rollups and chart breakdowns, a full PHPUnit test suite and a GitHub Actions pipeline that runs the tests on every push.

The problem. I wanted to write a real chess engine instead of importing one. Once that was working, wrapping a few more board games around it and adding online multiplayer turned it into a proper project.

What I built. Five games — chess, checkers, tic-tac-toe and two more — with the chess engine handling castling, en passant, pawn promotion and check detection from scratch. Firebase Realtime Database for live multiplayer matches, Firebase auth for accounts, and a service worker so it installs on mobile.

The problem. Bouncing between Google Photos, OneDrive and an external drive for personal files was annoying. I wanted one place I controlled, without ads or compression.

What I built. A PWA backed by Cloudinary's API for storage, with drag-and-drop uploads, previews for images, video and PDFs, offline browsing via a service worker, and mobile-installable so it lives on the home screen.

The problem. Coursework asked for an e-commerce build. I wanted to actually learn storefront patterns — cart state, wishlist, listings — on something I'd look at twice instead of a generic shop template.

What I built. A storefront for anime accessories: product grid, cart and wishlist in localStorage, Instagram feed integration for marketing, dark UI with scroll-based animations I wrote by hand instead of pulling in a library.

The problem. I wanted to learn PHP properly — not the script-soup version, the OOP version with abstract classes, interfaces, traits and namespaces. So I built an auth system from scratch instead of installing one.

What I built. Full registration and login with bcrypt password hashing, MySQL via PDO with prepared statements, role-based access control for admin and user roles, and a clean OOP structure: abstract base classes for users, interfaces for role behavior, traits for shared functionality.