Hello! I’m Mert Ersoy, a former medical doctor turned tech leader, with an unconventional leap from medicine to building the future of spreadsheets at NocoDB.
My love for coding actually started back in 4th grade, fueled by a mission to cheat at video games, but that’s a story for another day.
After years of medical study, I earned my MD but somewhere between anatomy labs and night shifts, the spark for technology I’d carried since childhood came rushing back. I made a bold pivot into the world of software, one I’ve never regretted, though my mom is still waiting for that moment.
For years, I wanted to contribute to open source but didn’t take the leap until early 2022. On 22-02-2022 (yes, the perfect palindrome date), I submitted my first Pull Request (PR) to NocoDB. A few contributions later, I got a message from the founder, Naveen: “Want to join the team?”
There was just one problem.
I was in my fifth year of medical school, deep in clinical rotations and also gearing up for the TUS - Turkey’s national exam for entering medical specializations. Ranked the world’s second hardest exam in a study, it’s the kind of test you can barely survive even if you dedicate your entire life to it. And here I was, being offered a full-time developer role.
We had an honest conversation. The verdict? Full-time wasn’t realistic, but we decided to try part-time while I finished med school. The real fork in the road was TUS. I had already enrolled in a TUS prep academy (a private institution in Turkey designed to train students for the national medical specialization exam). To take the NocoDB role, I had to walk away from that path entirely, choosing tech over TUS, while still pushing through the final 1.5 years of medical school to graduate.
So I worked days in the hospital, nights in code and somehow managed to graduate and ship features at the same time. One of those nights, during an ER shift, I hacked together NocoDB’s first AI proof-of-concept. At the time, none of our competitors had touched AI and that little experiment became the spark for our first offsite bootcamp, which we held in Istanbul so I could join during the two days off I got after a 24-hour hospital shift.
What started as “let’s see if this even works” has turned into a role I could never have imagined! Today, I’m Head of Engineering at NocoDB, helping thousands around the world build without a single line of code.
Looking back, it wasn’t just a career change. It was proof that you can rewrite your story, even while living two of them at once.
Life may look like a set of fixed roads but the truth is you can always carve a new one.
And this is only the beginning.
None of this would have been possible without my girlfriend’s support, now a brilliant plastic surgeon, who climbed her own mountain alongside me. While I balanced hospital work with NocoDB, she conquered the TUS, earning one of the most competitive spots in the country. I couldn’t be prouder of her ❤️