Anchored in Code: How a Weary Seafarer Gave Thousands a Fair Job Search at Sea

Today, I want to tell you a story. Its beginning goes back to the years of my youth, when I was mapping out my future. Back then, you can’t quite make sense of things — or at least, you lack the courage or the material and spiritual freedom to do what you truly want. Of course, when I think of people who have walked through much harsher paths, who have overcome countless hardships, left their homeland, or started life without a family, calling my own struggles “difficulties” sounds a bit ridiculous. I was born and raised in Turkey, and I still live there. If fate allows, I plan to die there. But life can be stubborn: it often refuses to let things unfold the way you planned. We simply cannot know the future.

Since childhood, I’ve always been drawn to computers, coding, web design, php, it’s not so much that they drew me in; rather, I found it easier to understand and construct things in those domains. Yet the environment you grow up in and the culture that shapes you can steer your ambitions in powerful ways, especially in difficult times, and leave a deep mark on how you plan your future.

In high school, I had to make a decision. In my country, after you finish high school, you and all your peers take an exam, and you are ranked from top to bottom according to your score. In those years, I had to tear myself away from the IT and software fields I enjoyed, because there’s a fixed curriculum, and within that curriculum there isn’t the slightest trace of up‑to‑date science. You are held responsible for things that were considered science three or four hundred years ago. So I had two choices: abandon everything and study for that exam, or gamble with life and go after the work I loved. But then the equation circled back to the start: if your parents don’t have savings to secure your future, you cannot gamble with it. You choose the safe path. And so did I. I put software aside and turned my attention to the interior angles of triangles, why chickpeas are wrinkled or not, and how to arrange the words in a Turkish sentence correctly.

I can almost hear some of you saying, “But you needed to know those things anyway.” The point is not knowing. The point is that a difference of one or two questions out of hundreds can shape your entire life. I did relatively well on that exam. At least, I can say that among the male students in my city, I had the highest ranking. After the exam, you have to list your preferences, and again, driven by financial worries, I made my choices — I chose maritime studies. The reason was clear: to earn a substantial income in a short time and build the life I wanted.

I didn’t enjoy a single second of my university years. For me, it was a place of military order, where hierarchy was applied in the most absurd way. You are trained to become a captain on commercial vessels, but you are trained with a soldier’s mentality. Somehow I graduated — but ask me what I went through during those years. Then I started working on commercial ships. I began at the most disciplined and prestigious maritime company in my country. And that, for me, was the real nightmare. I would work at sea for four months, take one or two months off on land, and then go back to sea. Captains who work on feeder and feedermax container vessels know that the pace is so relentless that if you can get five or six hours of uninterrupted sleep a day, you count yourself lucky.

I had nightmares at night — the most absurd nightmares I’ve ever seen. Their subject wasn’t destruction, disasters, or ghosts. In the dream, an inspector would come aboard and write me up for a non‑functioning fire extinguisher. Nonsense, funny things like that. I had to choose between my mental health and my professional development. And unfortunately, when you have to keep going, when you have to earn money, your choices cannot be romantic. Still, I left that company and moved to another where relatively more sensible people worked, where the ship tonnage was larger and voyages longer. I gave up a few thousand dollars from my salary, but quality of life is not always parallel to financial income.

For a while, everything was beautiful. Don’t let the word “beautiful” conjure up flowers and birds. I mean that when you spend seven or eight hours maneuvering in ‑25°C weather on the Baltic Sea, cursing the sea that keeps freezing over again, or fleeing pirates off the coast of West Africa, or trying to navigate the Yellow Sea without hitting hundreds of thousands of fishing boats — years pass before you know it. Then, suddenly, the company I worked for decided to stop employing Turkish seafarers on its container vessels. This happened at a time when I had just received my promotion to chief officer and was waiting for my ship assignment.

Here’s how things work on commercial vessels: your license doesn’t matter. The company employs you at whatever rank they see fit. You work for years, earn your stripes, and then they promote you. At our company, the procedure was that you needed to receive a promotion recommendation from at least two or three captains, then serve for at least one year in the fleet with a chief officer license, and only then could you qualify for an interview. Moreover, you are legally required to complete thirty‑six months of service at the lower rank before upgrading your qualification. Right after I had completed that very long process, the company said, “We are no longer working with you.” When you are about to receive the full reward for your effort, you instead have to start again at a lower rank in other companies because they don’t know you — you are the newcomer.

I sat down in front of my computer and began researching companies. I looked up one hundred to one hundred twenty companies and found the addresses of their human resources departments. I prepared an email, put them all in BCC, and sent my application. A few hours later, a personnel manager called me. “There’s a ship in two days, can you join to vessel?” I didn’t hesitate. My money was running low, old company had fired all of us, and years of effort had turned to ashes in an instant. “Okay,” I said, and I went.

When I arrived at the ship, I was in shock. There wasn’t a single unbroken piece of my cabin. The ship had been arrested and had been moored at the port for a while. The toilet was so filthy that I had never seen such squalor even in the public latrines of the world’s most underdeveloped cities. The third engineer who joined with me said he couldn’t sleep because of the footsteps of the cockroaches roaming at night. I have never in my life heard an insect make footsteps while walking. At least, in the lands of a Mediterranean child like me, there are no insects that big.

When I joined, because of the arrest, a few crew members have been dismissed, and everyone’s motivation was rock bottom. Breakfast was only bread and a few black olives; the stores were exhausted. After finishing my work, I came to my cabin at night and began to think. Why was I going through all this? I hadn’t committed any great sins until then. For example, I never liked fishing — I couldn’t bear to watch them suffer. When I saw a hungry animal on the street, I would be filled with sorrow. I didn’t like winters; dogs and cats would get cold in winter. I truly hated winters, and while I sat in my warm home, I would feel guilt for every creature left outside — as if their cold was my fault, as if I could somehow find a way to save them.

At that moment, my computer was open in front of me, and on the screen was that last bulk email I had sent. I was thinking, should I go or stay? Then the whole process I had been through came back to me: the anxiety attacks I suffered for months, wondering if they were going to fire us; the sleepless nights spent thinking, “Will I find another job easly?”; the suicidal thoughts that came as my money ran out. Then I thought: thousands of people go through this. Each one is struggling with their own life. And at that moment, an idea came to me. Maybe it had been done hundreds of times before, thought of thousands of times. But there, in front of me, were the contact addresses of hundreds of companies I had found after days of searching. And I said to myself: everyone has to find these addresses themselves, apply to each company one by one. I can do something about this. I’m fast on a computer. I know what data scraping is, how to send bulk emails, how to use a search engine with python. I can check whether an email actually arrives or lands in spam. I thought of the tens of thousands of seafarers who don’t understand any of this — what hard days they must be going through. They pay large sums of money on platforms that are completely useless, and they still can’t get beyond hope.

And so I started writing lines of code. What path should one follow to find a job at maritime companies? How could I compress weeks‑long searches into minutes? I first bought a paid account from an email provider. I researched, one by one, the current companies in my country and the job postings they had published for applications, and I collected their addresses. There are hundreds of platforms for these things. But there is almost no platform that employs seafarers like me and provides them with jobs. So I developed a system where seafarers could fill out a single form and apply to hundreds of companies in seconds. Its name was DenizLink. But there was a problem: the emails were being sent from my website’s email address. From the very first month, hundreds of applications started coming in. I hadn’t expected such volume. And that was my first shock. Nearly half of the companies on my list had blocked me.

After working in the industry for many years, you build a certain network. Later I learned that there was a game going on. For years, while we were working on ships, they would deceive us, saying, “We can’t find anyone to fill your position, there are no qualified seafarers.” But when I looked at the screen, I saw veterans who had given many years to the sea, and brilliant young people, all looking for work — and the companies were rejecting them. The reason was even sadder. The HR managers had formed their own internal order and made deals with certain intermediaries. These intermediaries took commissions from the companies and/or the seafarers, and then shared that money as bribes with the relevant managers. They all had their own pools and their own people. They had no concern about finding qualified seafarers. Their only concern was taking bribes. And here I was, constantly emailing the company addresses, saying, “Look, dozens, hundreds of seafarers want to work with you.” So I changed my method first. I wrote a system that allowed people to apply in bulk using their personal email addresses so they can’t block me. I researched all directories, indexed all websites. For nights on end, I tested the deliverability of addresses, and I made information that people would otherwise struggle months to obtain accessible within minutes.

I built a platform that respects spam limits, where people could use just a few minutes of their free time each day to apply to hundreds of companies. And most importantly, I designed it so that anyone could use the system to its full extent for free. For free, a seafarer can apply to hundreds of companies. To access the entire list of companies, they need to invite a few friends. For those who want unlimited access without inviting anyone, I set a price no higher than the cost of a single meal. I hope to touch people’s lives. I hope to help thousands of captains, thousands of engineers, and thousands of seafarers spend their precious time with their families instead of searching for jobs, to ease their anxieties about finding a ship and going to sea, and to cause a relief in their lives.

Thank you for sparing your time to read this. I wish everyone tranquil seas and serenity.