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I was thinking about having a blog for a while and forcing myself to write. When I had the time, I wanted to give it a go. So here I am, hi!

Before talking about the current feelings, I want to give a little bit of context. I am a software engineer. My full-time working life started in 2011, while I was still a student at university in Istanbul, Turkey.

I moved to Germany in 2019 with my wife. Until then, I worked for the same company. The company had problems with legal authorities and went bankrupt last year.

I took big responsibilities in every company I worked for. I designed, developed, and maintained various projects. I also took care of the juniors.

I switched between companies when I wanted. I was always on the safe side with employment. Until the bankruptcy, I never had a month without a salary from the beginning of my career.

I see now that I made some mistakes with my professional choices, but you can’t change the past. I can talk about those mistakes later in another post. So I move on from this topic for now.

After I lost my job, I thought it was a good chance to learn German. So I did. I took a B1 course for 2 months and a B2 course for 5 months. During all this time, I got Arbeitslosengeld from the Bundesagentur für Arbeit, and I am thankful to the German social system, because I wouldn’t have had any chance to learn German without them. In the end, I got my B2 certificate, and I am proud, even though this process took 10 months from beginning to end.

Also, I had time to think about my future while I was still attending the courses daily. With a friend of mine, we developed a software product called Kumanda. Customer recruitment is going slow, which we expected. We already have customers who use our product daily. We are hoping to get new ones in the near future. We knew we could not easily replace our incomes with this product, so we continued to develop another software. The second one was a Smart TV application that we developed over the last 5–6 weeks. And yesterday, we stopped developing it. The reason was that we got an e-mail saying it is unlikely that we are getting an approval to distribute the application on application store. Which is not good, but not the end of the world.

I am still grateful that I have my own product and can earn from it in the future. But it is not enough, and I need to feed my family. By the way, I have a son who is 4 years old right now. Having a child is the best thing I have done in my life. There is nothing better.

Today, I need to return to job searching, and it is not a good time for it. I am aware of that. We will see how that goes.