Zafer AydinI am a software engineer at a company named Mak-say. My company produces smart electricity meters and we are the top vendor of electricity meters in our country, Turkey.

In almost every month in our country, electricity distrubution companies need to transfer data from the meters of their customers. So we have developed a solution to them which does the job. Our project, called Automatic Meter Reading(AMR), enables them to read their meters anytime they want. The project has also a web based user interface which visualize the data.

In our project, we have a windows service software which checks the database for any user data transfer requests. Simply, when there is a request, the service connects to modems by TCP/IP and gathers all requested data from the meters. Then users can login to web interface to see all the reports produced from database. We read over 2500 meters in the field and it seems that this number will grow rapidly.

In the field, we have been using Fastract(Q2406B), Fastract Supreme and Fastract Xtend for over 4 years. Also nowadays we have produced a new product, a GSM/GPRS gateway, which has Airprime inside. For all modems, we have developed a smart modem software which can do encryption, authentication, reading several kinds of meters with various baudrates, logging, time synchronization etc.

Personally, i have about 4 years career that can be considered as beginning of a career. I think there are so many interesting areas which wait to be discovered. My major expertise is developing PC softwares either windows and web. However, i find developing Open AT very exiting. i try to follow developer forum as much as i can. i have found many useful tips and solutions over there.

In addition to the office life, i like watching movies very much. During a year, i watch once in two days. So i am about to run out of my movie collection. i also enjoy meeting with my friends and travel around the city. it helps me keep away from software stuff temporary. I think in private life we need such things that keep us out of our job so that we can keep the excitement of our job as if we are starting from the beginning.