Erol Kaftanoğlu
1994 — 2025
Senior Android Developer · Loodos
Google Developer Group İstanbul
İstanbul · Kadıköy · Acıbadem
Erol was kind-hearted, humble, and someone whose whole life was simply working — and trying to help everyone. A Computer Engineer and Senior Android Developer, he spent his last years at Loodos. He was a volunteer at GDG İstanbul for over eight years and organized countless workshops and meetups. The repository from his "Firebase Codelab" in July 2017 is still open today. To him, engineering was a thing you shared: writing code mattered, but sitting next to someone and solving it together mattered more.
His Nature
Erol was kind-hearted, humble, and someone whose whole life was simply working — and trying to help everyone. Whether he knew you or not, whether you were an engineering student, a neighbor, or a new face at a GDG meetup he sat next to — he never hurt anyone, never turned his back. Helping wasn’t a choice for him; it was his nature.
After the Earthquake
After the February 6, 2023 earthquake, Erol gave day and night. He pitched in on the volunteer tech response — aid coordination platforms, missing-person tracking, fast communication tooling built by the developer community. In Slack channels, GitHub issues, phone calls, he showed how an engineer behaves in a crisis: quietly, tirelessly, focused only on getting the work done right. Those were the days when everyone who loved him saw, once again, exactly who he was.
University & Early Years
Fatih Sultan Mehmet Vakıf University, Computer Engineering. As a student he was active in the IoT student club; he built a robot arm driven by a Kinect, hopped between Arduino and Processing, between parallel programming homework and discrete structures exercises. The repositories he accumulated on GitHub from 2014 onward trace an unbroken line from those curious years to today.
GDG İstanbul — At the Heart of the Community
From his "Firebase Codelab" at GDG İstanbul in July 2017 on, he was the steady heart of the community for over eight years. To him, community was a place for sharing, not titles. When a beginner hesitated to ask a question, he was always the first to extend a hand. The codelabs, workshops, and meetups he ran are still remembered as the moment thousands of developers in İstanbul first met Android and Firebase.
Senior Android Developer
He started with Java, went deep when Kotlin first arrived. He experimented with Flutter, crossed into the backend with Firebase Functions. As a Senior Android Developer in his last years, from architecture calls to PR reviews, he was quietly the spine of his team. He kept giving time to open-source repos, blog posts, and conference talks.
Teaching
"The best thing you learn is the thing you can explain." So he gave his time: to new graduates, to the person waiting backstage before their first conference, to messages that ran until morning for a mock interview, to those long conversations over coffee. The "For You" section of this page shares what he left behind — for you.