chabatu_

I build things, break things, and stay up too late figuring out why they broke.

Turkish, based in Riga. Studying IT, building networks and finance tools on the side, and spending a strange amount of my week paid to break video games and AI systems on purpose.

See what I'm building Get in touch
~/about.md

About

I'm Cha — a Turkish techie currently living in Riga, Latvia, where I'm studying IT at RNU. Before any of that I spent years working at sea and in hospitality, which is probably why I'm unreasonably calm when something breaks in production.

I've spent a lot of the last year saying yes to problems and learning whatever it took to solve them — that's how a hotel reception job turned into building a MikroTik hotspot, a guest portal, a SPA booking system, and RFID keycard ordering for the bar from scratch. Somewhere in there I picked up real networking chops: FreeRADIUS, Ubuntu administration, firewall rules, and enough patience to actually chase down why a connection is failing.

ALCOP, the project this site used to be built around, is on hold for now, but I still come back to it. On the side, I get paid to professionally break things: I test AA and AAA games and AI systems for a living.

~/now
  • drwx studying IT — RNU, Riga
  • drwx testing games & AI — Lionbridge
  • drwx MikroTik, FreeRADIUS & Ubuntu networking
  • drwx shipping small things on Cloudflare Workers
  • drwx ALCOP — on hold, not forgotten
~/projects

Selected work

~/projects/dalyan-live-hotel 2026

Working reception at Dalyan Live Hotel, I ended up building four systems the hotel didn't have — mostly by saying yes to problems and learning what I needed on the way.

01 — hotspot & captive portal

Hotel Wi-Fi hotspot, built from scratch

Set up the hotel's guest Wi-Fi from the ground up: a MikroTik router running a captive portal, authenticating through FreeRADIUS, talking to an Ubuntu server that queries the hotel's PMS by room number and passport number to let guests online. Along the way I learned MikroTik/Winbox, FreeRADIUS, Ubuntu server administration, firewall rules, NAT (src-nat), and how to actually chase down a network problem instead of just rebooting the router.

MikroTik / Winbox FreeRADIUS Ubuntu Captive portal PMS API Networking
02 — guest portal

Guest portal, reachable only on the hotel network

Built on top of the hotspot: an Nginx site on a separate Ubuntu box that checks a guest in with their room number and passport against the PMS, shows their live hotel bill, and connects to the front desk's Telegram through a bot/API — so guests can send a complaint, call a taxi, place an order, or book a spa slot straight from their phone.

Nginx Ubuntu PMS API Telegram bot
03 — spa booking & payroll

Local PMS for the SPA department

A booking and payroll system for the hotel spa: a JSX calendar interface backed by Cloudflare, live bookings and payments, automatic commission calculations per therapist, and manager-only revenue analytics behind a proper permissions layer — all running on a local API and SQL database.

JSX Cloudflare SQL Local API Role-based access
04 — rfid bar ordering

Room keycards as bar payment, via RFID

Bar staff mishearing room numbers meant charges landing on the wrong folio. So I turned the guests' existing room keycards into a way to confirm orders: after an order is entered, the guest taps their card on an RFID reader, and a browser extension I wrote sends the card's UID to an Ubuntu server in the hotel's server room. The server looks the guest up in Elektra, the hotel's PMS, and the screen asks the bartender to confirm — "Room 302, Rachel?" — before the extension posts the items straight to the right room folio.

Cards are issued the same way they are at check-in, from a staff-only admin panel inside the guest portal: type a room number, it pulls the guests staying there from Elektra, pick a guest, and tap the card on a phone to read its UID over NFC. All the data stays on the hotel's local network, and it takes work off staff instead of adding to it.

RFID NFC Browser extension Ubuntu Elektra PMS Folio posting
~/projects/forecast ongoing

Forecast — personal finance tracker

A finance dashboard I built for myself: it pulls live exchange rates to track income, spending, and balances across currencies in real time, stores everything in Cloudflare KV, and lays it out as graphs and numbers I actually check.

Cloudflare Workers Cloudflare KV Live FX rates Data viz
~/projects/alcop 2025 — on hold

ALCOP

The project I originally started building this site around. It's on hold while opportunities like the Dalyan Live Hotel work took priority, but I still come back to it — write a proper line here about what it does, who it's for, and what it's built with when you're ready.

On hold
Open ALCOP
~/projects/fun 2025

A small love-coded game

A tiny game I built for my girlfriend, mostly by vibe coding it into existence over a few late nights. It's not trying to be serious — it's just a nice thing that exists because I wanted to make her something.

Play the game
~/experience

Experience

~/contact

Get in touch

cha@chabatu:~/contact

$ contact --list