Mehmet Davut is the software engineer who founded MDSW. He has been writing software since 2003, professionally since 2007, and independently through MDSW since 2013. He holds three master's degrees from Istanbul Bilgi University and researches small language models. ORCID: 0000-0001-9787-4588.

How does an engagement with MDSW work?

I own the architecture, the infrastructure and the engineering decisions, and keep the accounts and the documentation in the company's name. The engagement succeeds when the company can run its technical side without me.

In Istanbul, Türkiye. I work remotely with companies in Türkiye, the EU, Canada and the US, in English or Turkish.

Mehmet Davut

I founded MDSW, Mehmet Davut Software Works, in 2013. Helping companies build sustainable software and teams.

I help founders turn uncertain or stalled technical environments into reliable systems that can be operated, maintained, and eventually handed over. Sometimes that means writing the code myself; sometimes it means leading a small team around a specific problem. The constant is technical ownership: understanding the situation, making the decisions, building what is needed, and leaving the system stronger than I found it.

How I got here

I wrote my first paid software, a website, in 2003, when I was 15. Traineeships and projects followed, all of them in software, and in 2007 I joined a company as a software developer.

MDSW started in 2013 almost by accident. I was leaving a job because the office was far from home, and my boss asked me to keep working remotely. To do that I needed to invoice him, so I set up a company. Soon the other companies I had worked with asked for the same arrangement, and MDSW became my way of working.

Since 2021 I have worked with Mazepay, a Danish B2B spend and payments platform, as a Senior Backend Engineer in the core team, contracted through MDSW.

What MDSW does now

My role is closer to a technical partner than an individual contributor executing tickets. I built a T-shaped profile deliberately: my engineering work is supported by an MSc in Technology Entrepreneurship and Innovation, an MA in Marketing Communications, and an MSc in Computer Engineering. This gives me a practical understanding of the connection between engineering decisions, customers, stakeholders, risk, and money.

I take on Fractional CTO, Founding Engineer, and early-stage Tech Lead engagements, and assemble project-specific teams when the problem requires expertise beyond my own. You can read about past engagements in the case notes, and see what the studio has built in the catalog. The services page describes what I offer today.

I also believe in being explicit about boundaries. I am not positioning myself as a Principal Engineer for massive-scale distributed systems, nor am I a fit for heavy matrix organizations or purely ticket-driven enterprise roles. My best work is building the technical foundation, making it reliable, and transferring ownership to the people who will carry it forward. My measure of success is simple: making myself unnecessary.

Research

Over the past two years I have moved deliberately into applied AI: training, evaluating, and deploying cost-effective small language models (SLMs), building reproducible AI pipelines, and designing trust architectures where probabilistic AI can interact safely with deterministic financial systems.

My computer engineering thesis at Istanbul Bilgi University covers LoRA fine-tuning of small language models on synthetic code data: 96 models across 8 architectures, where a 1.5B-parameter specialist closed most of the gap to a generalist 4.7 times its size. It is MDSW 1 in the catalog, and the models and datasets are on Hugging Face.

About the name

Mehmet Davut is a common name in Türkiye, and several people share it. I am the software engineer and researcher who founded MDSW, ORCID 0000-0001-9787-4588.

Elsewhere

To talk about working together, email mehmet@mdsw.tr or see the contact page.

Questions

What is MDSW?: MDSW (Mehmet Davut Software Works) is an independent technical studio in Istanbul, founded in 2013. Helping companies build sustainable software and teams. It builds its own products and takes on technical partnership work with founders.
Who is Mehmet Davut?: Mehmet Davut is the software engineer who founded MDSW. He has been writing software since 2003, professionally since 2007, and independently through MDSW since 2013. He holds three master's degrees from Istanbul Bilgi University and researches small language models. ORCID: 0000-0001-9787-4588.
How does an engagement with MDSW work?: I own the architecture, the infrastructure and the engineering decisions, and keep the accounts and the documentation in the company's name. The engagement succeeds when the company can run its technical side without me.
Where is MDSW based?: In Istanbul, Türkiye. I work remotely with companies in Türkiye, the EU, Canada and the US, in English or Turkish.