Some developers keep a polished portfolio. Fatih Kadir Akın keeps a public workbench.
His GitHub profile is full of tools, experiments, and open-source projects built around problems he wanted to understand. It is also unusually easy to remember: his username is simply f.
Fatih joins the first LatentShift lineup as a Developer Advocate at WordPress, Automattic. He is also a GitHub Star, author, and long-time participant in developer communities. The thread connecting those roles is not a particular framework. It is his habit of making what he learns useful to other people.
Build the thing you need
Fatih describes himself as a JavaScript and Ruby developer who loves web technologies and open-source development. His public projects show a wider curiosity. They range from command-line tools and developer utilities to Textream, a teleprompter app that follows a speaker’s voice.
The best-known example is prompts.chat. It began on 5 December 2022 as a personal repository for keeping prompts organized, at a time when ChatGPT did not yet retain conversation history. Fatih put the collection in public, other people contributed, and a personal notebook grew into a community-maintained resource.
The scale is interesting, but the origin is more revealing. He encountered a missing tool, built a useful first version, and left the door open for others.
A full-circle WordPress story
His relationship with WordPress started from the user side. In his own account on WordPress.org, Fatih explains that he used WordPress and WooCommerce to launch Stickker.net instead of spending his time building an ecommerce system from scratch.
That decision let him test the business and concentrate on customers. He ran it for six years before it was acquired, according to the same account. Years later, he joined Automattic and the WordPress team behind the platform that had helped him get started.
It is a neat arc, but it also says something practical about his approach to software: use existing foundations when they solve the problem, then invest energy where it can create something new.
Share the unfinished parts too
Open source is only one part of Fatih’s public practice. He writes, organizes conferences, and shares what he is learning with developer communities. His personal blog explicitly makes room for stumbling blocks alongside successful experiments.
That matters to LatentShift. Useful engineering knowledge rarely arrives as a perfectly clean result. It comes with attempts, revisions, and decisions that make more sense once somebody explains the context.
We are glad Fatih will be part of our first edition in İstanbul on 17 October. Until then, the best way to get to know his work is to explore his GitHub, WordPress profile, or prompts.chat.