MDSW, a technical studio in Istanbul

I build engineering systems that keep working without me, then hand them over to your team.

My name is Mehmet Davut, and MDSW is my independent technical studio based in Istanbul, founded in 2013. Helping companies build sustainable software and teams. I have been writing software since 2003, professionally since 2007, working as a systems engineer, applied AI specialist, and fractional technical partner. I usually come into projects that are stalled or chaotic. I set up a steady way of shipping, then move what I know into the team, the code and the documentation, so the company stops depending on me.

I have worked with B2B fintech companies and early-stage startups, and the pattern repeats. I turned a founder's spreadsheet into a platform that is still running more than a decade later. I took over a stalled loyalty app and gave it automated tests and CI/CD. Each time, the goal was to make myself unnecessary. I build the quality habits, set the architecture, train the team, and step back once things run smoothly.

As a fractional CTO, I care about practical engineering and cloud cost (FinOps). Before adding people or budget, I look at how well the current ones are used. I was part of the team that moved a live, regulated payment gateway from REST to GraphQL, and I have moved hand-built cloud setups into Terraform before handing them back to the local developers. Money saved on infrastructure is runway, so I treat it as a business number.

In the last two years I moved into applied AI, mostly where AI models meet financial systems that have to be exact. I train and deploy small language models (SLMs) that are cheap to run and small enough for your own hardware. In the systems I design, AI only helps people with their work. Reconciliation and accounting run on approved, deterministic data alone.

I write up my work openly as Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) and reproducible research. You can read them in the case notes and the catalog, and the services page describes how I work with companies today. MDSW takes on fractional CTO, founding engineer and applied AI engagements. If you are a founder and need someone to own the technical side of your company, let's talk.