Former ship’s officer, now CTPO · Valencia

Software for ships, crews and the people who train them.

I’m Ismail Aksoy, Chief Technology & Product Officer at MTR. I started on the bridge, then spent the next decade building maritime training and fleet software. Here I write about systems that must work offline, AI that must be right, and leading the teams that build both.

Read the writing About me

Now

Oct 2026

Building Ship-to-shore data sync for fleets on intermittent VSAT
Writing Why AI output is not evidence, in training and in operations
Leading Engineering and product at MTR, Istanbul and remote
Learning Spanish, slowly, in Valencia

2009years in maritime

20articles published

5topics

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Security LeadershipCode & Systems

Listen before you claim: adding a security gateway to a ship's network without an outage

A shipboard security gateway must not take the router's address until it knows the router can take it back. That means hearing VRRP without speaking it. The receive path drops those packets twice before a firewall rule can see them. Here is where to listen instead, with no new privileges.

Nov 8, 20269 min read

Writing

From the logbook

All 20 articles

Staging Vessel Firewall Policies with Shadow Chains

Staging a firewall change should not suspend the policy already protecting a vessel. This follow-up examines shadow enforcement in nftables: testing a candidate alongside the active policy, and four design traps that could let observation alter live traffic.

Oct 31, 20268 min read

Code & Systems Security Leadership

Bounded Flow Recording and Firewall Enforcement in Vessel Networks

A shipboard gateway design review revealed how nftables dynamic set limits could drop permitted traffic. This article examines how separating flow recording from enforcement, measuring missing evidence, and testing rule structure can preserve firewall policy decisions across shipboard network zones.

Oct 25, 20269 min read

Code & Systems Security Leadership

The Ceramics Workshop and the AI Illusion

AI makes it easy to create reports, code, and strategies. But an output is not necessarily a correct result. Like children shaping clay without mastering the craft, organizations need context, trusted data, metrics, and human judgment to turn AI output into real value.

Sep 17, 20266 min read

Leadership Insights

Auditing E-Learning: Content, Runtime, and a Service-Agnostic Toolkit

Generative tools compress course production from weeks to hours. But that relocates risk rather than removing it: an AI-generated course is fluent and visually complete by default, and that polish masks the errors it may contain. Surface polish is no longer evidence of substantive correctness.

Jul 10, 202613 min read

Product Excellence

Synchronizing Ship-to-Shore Databases Over Intermittent VSAT Networks

Standard cloud synchronization fails over high-latency maritime VSAT. This blueprint details an asynchronous, bidirectional data pipeline using a Rust daemon, HTTP/3, and PostgreSQL CDC to maintain deterministic relational consistency across offline fleets without heavy message brokers.

Apr 3, 20266 min read

Code & Systems Tech Innovation

Architecting an AI Knowledge Agent for Maritime Regulatory Compliance

Moving from concept to code, this study details a hybrid RAG system built on GCP and Rust. By merging vector search with temporal knowledge graphs, we’ve created an auditable AI tool that navigates complex IMO regulations with precision and safety.

Mar 20, 20267 min read