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OBARSAL.DEVOpen to work

RUBAR OZAN BARSAL

I build the systems that let teams ship software with AI.

Staff software engineer, more than a decade building end-to-end platforms. I introduced the AI-assisted workflow a team develops on, and I build on the platform alongside them: integrations, internal tooling and architecture.

Get in touchSee the work
  • AI-ASSISTED DEVELOPMENT
  • FORWARD-DEPLOYED DELIVERY
  • UTC+3
  • REMOTE OR EU RELOCATION

How I work with AI

The workflow a whole team develops on is the interesting part, more than how fast any one of us writes code.

Claude Code wired into Jira and Figma over MCP, GitHub CLI automation, and custom skills for auditing, documentation and component generation. Layered repository rules with maintained memory make the coding agents generate against the design system’s components and tokens. Work moves from ticket to pull request through plain language and a few links.

The workflow holds up on Adobe Experience Manager, a stack AI models have seen very little of. It wasn’t the first attempt: Cursor and GitHub Copilot’s agent mode were tried on the same codebase and dropped, because neither was performant enough and both needed more human input than Claude Code to reach production quality.

I introduced it to the main repository in March 2026 as two rule files, and I review the team’s changes as they extend it: 58 files now, edited by 13 engineers, seven of them in the month to September 2026.

Pull request volume roughly doubled and median time to merge went from 3.3 hours to 2.7. The number of changes merged without a human review doubled along with the volume: the share held, the count didn’t. So the constraint is review capacity now, and that is what the tooling has to address next.

Selected work

  • Enterprise platform
  • Adobe Experience Manager

An enterprise AEM platform, and the AI-assisted workflow the team develops on. Client confidential.

  • Joined a build already in flight; little had shipped
  • Components built for the platform’s token-based, two-theme design system
  • Okta authentication integration owned; Stripe payments and a multi-step transactional flow alongside the team
  • On a team of 10–15 active developers at a time
  • Cursor and GitHub Copilot’s agent mode tried and dropped before this one held

I brought the workflow into the main repository in March 2026 as two rule files and reviewed the team’s changes as they built the set out. Alongside that I built on the platform through the same workflow, mostly its React front end, with Java where needed. Within six months, 25 of the 51 engineers who had committed to the repository were shipping AI-assisted work.

Repository contributors shipping AI-assisted work within six months
25 of 51
Time for the team to double
26 weeks
Commits per active developer-week over the same period
+24%
Pull request volume doubled; median time to merge
3.3 h → 2.7 h
  • Adobe Experience Manager
  • Claude Code
  • MCP
  • GitHub CLI
  • Java
  • TypeScript
  • Forrester Research
  • Authoring pipeline

An authoring pipeline that ran on paste.

  • Seventeen months on the client-facing application that delivers Forrester’s research to its clients (Vue/Nuxt)
  • The research page owned end to end — a preview for members without access, the full paper with its charts and graphics for those with it, driven by Contentful
  • The application’s design system built and maintained in code: an atomic component library with SCSS tokens and utilities
  • Authors used to copy approved documents into the CMS by hand and rebuild the formatting

I built much of the companion Contentful authoring editor — a Word research template goes in, structured rich text and components come out.

  • Contentful
  • Vue
  • Nuxt
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • Design systems

Also worked with

Clients I’ve built for, across finance, insurance, research, hospitality, automotive and government: some as sole developer on campaign work, some as engineer or tech lead on platforms whose architecture and delivery I owned.

  • Forrester Research
  • Manulife
  • TELUS
  • Marriott International
  • Travel + Leisure
  • Casio
  • ING Bank
  • Akbank
  • Koç Digital
  • Volkswagen Türkiye
  • n11
  • Prekindle
  • Decktopus

About

I’ve spent more than a decade in agencies, building for finance, insurance, automotive and research clients, from small sites to enterprise platforms. Mostly as a developer, and on the Manulife and Terrion (TELUS) builds as tech lead of four- and five-developer teams. The work I’m best at is end to end: the architecture and integrations, and the standards a team builds against.

Since 2025 the centre of it has been how a team develops with AI. I introduce the workflow, review the team’s changes as they extend it, and build on the platform through it. It started with Cursor rule sets on three TELUS repositories; the Claude Code workflow above came after.

I’ve always been in the room with clients, authoring teams and stakeholders. Years of weekly demos taught me to translate between what people need and what actually gets built. Building that kind of tooling is the work I want more of.

I studied American Culture and Literature before I wrote code professionally, which is probably why I end up doing as much explaining as engineering. Early on, a faux-3D YouTube masthead I built for a bank’s sponsorship of an Anish Kapoor exhibition got me invited to Google’s Istanbul office to explain the technique to a US team on a conference call. I work best where communication is direct and people are treated with respect.

Skills

AI-assisted development
  • Claude Code
  • Cursor
  • GitHub Copilot
  • MCP servers and integrations (Jira, Figma, Slack)
  • Agentic workflows and guardrails
  • Context engineering — repository rules, custom skills and memory
  • Human-in-the-loop review
  • Rolling tooling out to a team and measuring adoption
  • Forward-deployed client delivery
Developer experience & tooling
  • Internal developer tooling
  • Onboarding
  • Code review at scale
  • CI/CD (GitHub Actions)
  • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)
  • IAM
  • AWS (Lambda)
  • Google Cloud Platform
  • Cloudflare
Languages & frameworks
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • React
  • Next.js
  • Vue
  • Nuxt
  • Node.js
  • Express
  • Java
Enterprise & CMS
  • Adobe Experience Manager (Sites; Adobe Certified Expert, 2026)
  • Contentful
  • Strapi
Front-end craft
  • Design systems
  • Design tokens
  • Component libraries
  • Accessibility
  • Performance
Integrations
  • Okta
  • Stripe
  • REST
  • GraphQL
Languages
  • Turkish (native)
  • English (native-level)

Contact

info@obarsal.dev