I Studied Medicine for Six Years to Build Software
Hello! I’m Mert Ersoy, a former medical doctor turned engineer, now Head of Engineering at NocoDB.
My love for coding actually started back in 4th grade, trying to cheat at video games, but that’s a story for another day.
After years of medical study, I earned my MD. But I never really stopped coding, and at some point it became clear which one I wanted to do. I chose software over medicine, and I’ve never regretted it, 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.
Life may look like a set of fixed roads but the truth is you can always carve a new one.
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 ❤️