About

I was born in Nişantaşı on 28 December 2004. I am my family's only child. With my family's help, I grew up inside technology and art.

I was a difficult kid. Like any child, I gave most of my focus to whatever caught my interest. Technology and art were the clearest proof. From six to nine I drew constantly. With my father's old Polaroid 600 Extreme, black body, turquoise details, I photographed the bright, living things that woke my curiosity.

I grew up wildly curious. I always wanted the background of everything I used and saw. That curiosity changed my life one evening in November 2013, while I played Minecraft with friends. A few videos that night taught me how to set up a server. We built it together. We spammed it across the chat platforms kids used then. It caught on. I kept at it until May 2015. I remember the date so clearly because it lined up with the end of fifth grade.

In middle school I barely left the computer. I was just as present at school events and shows. If something was happening, I was almost always there.

This was not only in-game work. Minecraft ran on Java. The server side did too. We had to learn Java to write custom plugins. I learned it the way people said then: as a "CTRL+C, CTRL+V programmer." Then I turned toward one of the biggest dreams I had carried since childhood: building my own social network. I started to learn PHP and Apache.

In the last quarter of 2015 I began building my still unnamed social network, and the other ideas that felt utopian with what I knew then, through learning PHP. Until 2017 I worked in a try, make, learn loop.

In the middle of that stretch, in March 2016, I lost my uncle. It was the heaviest blow I had taken until then.

In 2017, still in middle school, I started the project from scratch. I rolled up my sleeves to put something reasonably ready in front of a user. I designed it through trial and error and got to work. That is how Glynet first appeared.

My family was my biggest support. I saw that most clearly here. I told them I had this project and I wanted to grow it. They said yes at once. Within a week we trademarked Glynet at a patent office in Ayrılık Çeşmesi. The strange part is that my first real fork in the road happened right there, at Ayrılık Çeşmesi. They also rented my first server from DigitalOcean and gave it to me as a gift. I never forgot the money they put in, or the belief.

I finished the build. I shared it with friends and on tech forums. From the day I launched it to the day I shut it down, Glynet drew intense interest. People around me took it in. I still run into profiles that use Glynet's smiling default avatar. In that stretch I learned other languages and structures. I had opened a large door for myself.

In 2019, still in high school, I joined Eva Team at Altınbaş University. The team was entering TÜBİTAK Efficiency Challenge and Autonomous Robotaxi races. Working in a university team with older teammates while I was still in high school widened my field of view. 2019 was Eva Team's first year too. That first year we took third among many universities in Efficiency Challenge. It multiplied my hunger for the work. It was not a one-off. We took third again in the years that followed. I entered Efficiency Challenge six times in total, and Robotaxi three times.

The excitement had a cost. In the last two or three months before a race we almost never left the office. We lived there. In a room where everyone pushed to win, you had to work with discipline, then past discipline, until the job was done. Sometimes we stayed on the same problem for hours. Sometimes for days. It was hard. When we ate the fruit as a team, it was worth it.

In later years the team's range grew. From 2022 on I entered the Unmanned Aerial Vehicle contest three times, both fixed wing and rotary wing. I also took part in the Teknofest Roketsan mid-altitude rocket contest. Eva Team gave me something beyond all of that. I met many academics, engineers, and founders. I noticed there the pleasure that connecting people woke in me. Building ecosystems and making them reachable for the end user has, I think, been my largest passion since then.

As Eva Team grew heavier, the time I could give Glynet shrank. I touched it now and then. In the last quarter of 2020 I left the work for good.

In 2022 I started higher education at Istanbul Arel University, Faculty of Communication, Cinema and Television. In the same period I enrolled in the Computer Technologies associate degree at Anadolu University. I graduated in 2024. The twin line of technology and art that had run through my childhood kept running through university.

I did not stop on the cinema side. I directed many music videos, "Hayalin" among them. I also worked on independent shorts and documentaries as director, camera, and editor.

In July 2024, on holiday on the Aegean coast, an idea arrived. I wanted to gather the things I had been carrying separately under one roof. While I thought about a name, I looked for something that would make me glad. I was born in Nişantaşı, but I grew up in Çengelköy. The name and the place had always sat well with me. From there I found Cengel.

In February 2026, Cengel as I know it now began to take its real shape.

Take care,
Metehan Alp Saral