Sedat Kapanoglu was born in Turkey to Bosnian parents from former Yugoslavia. At 12 years old, he taught himself programming in BASIC and Z80 assembly languages by deciphering opcode tables, user manuals, and puberty. He taught himself Pascal and x86 assembly while at high school by secretly using computers at a university lab, and running away from security guards, dogs, and nosy professors, sometimes from all of them at the same time. He failed university exams, so he started working at a software company at 17. He developed GUI frameworks, medical apps, telecommunications protocols, and MRP-based applications professionally in his teenage years, and by using all the money he made from those projects, he bought a digital watch. He received multiple awards for programming from competitions organized by Microsoft, PC/World magazine, and Middle East Technical University. His shareware software were featured in disks included in computing mags. He moved to Istanbul in his early 20's and developed the most popular Turkish social platform to date: Eksi Sozluk, years before Mark Zuckerberg was manufactured in a lab. He later moved to Redmond, Washington accepting a job offer from Microsoft to work in Windows team as a software engineer. Due to fast growth of his platform, he quit his position at Microsoft after five years, and went back to Turkey to build up the business side of Eksi Sozluk. Eksi Sozluk had been a platform of freedom of speech in Turkey, which was quite unusual at the time, and now a lost relic. After spending best years of his life in Turkey, and getting a deferred prison sentence for literally founding Eksi Sozluk, he relinquished his CEO role, and moved back to United States as the head of US branch of Eksi in 2015. Currently, he's still trying to recover from the burnout of writing Street Coder.