Silver Turku

Full-Stack Engineer / Co-Founder

Marketplaces · E-commerce · On-device AI · Real-time systems

Emailsilverturku@gmail.com
GitHubgithub.com/itsSilver
Phone+355 69 606 5628
LocationTirana, Albania

Full-stack engineer and co-founder. I've spent close to ten years building e-commerce sites, marketplaces, and mobile apps, and on most of them I handled both the frontend and the backend myself. These days my work is mostly TypeScript (Bun, Hono, Nuxt, Drizzle, and Postgres), and lately I've been going deeper into native Swift and on-device AI. Right now I'm co-founding and running two products: Halo, a privacy-first AI app for the Mac, and Thrift, a second-hand fashion marketplace for iOS, Android, and the web. I like taking a product the whole way, from the database and API out to the apps, payments, and deployment.

Ventures · Co-Founder & Owner

Halo heyhalo.app 2026 – Present
Co-Founder, Owner & Engineer · macOS · On-device AI

A privacy-first AI companion for the Mac. Everything runs on-device.

Halo watches your active screen, transcribes your calls and meetings, and quietly builds a private memory of what you've seen and heard. You can ask it questions or let it nudge you with the occasional suggestion, and all of it stays on your Mac. It runs quantized GGUF models through llama.cpp on Apple's Metal and Neural Engine, with swappable tiers picked to fit the machine (Qwen3-4B by default, heavier local models on capable hardware), does its own RAG over a local SQLite store with on-device embeddings, and can take actions through an agentic tool loop built on the Model Context Protocol. I built it as a 17-package Swift 6 / SwiftUI monorepo, with a small Cloudflare Workers backend handling licensing and zero-knowledge (AES-256-GCM) sync, and notarized, signed auto-updates.

Swift 6 SwiftUI On-device LLM llama.cpp / Metal Core ML Apple Vision RAG / Embeddings MCP Cloudflare Workers Hono Stripe
Thrift thrift.al 2025 – Present
Co-Founder, Owner & Engineer · iOS · Android · Web · API

A second-hand fashion marketplace for Albania, with mobile and web apps on a real-time backend.

I built Thrift across three apps: a React Native (Expo) app for iOS and Android, a Nuxt 4 web app on Cloudflare Pages, and a Bun and Hono API. One OpenAPI spec ties them together and generates the typed clients, so the apps and the backend never drift apart. It has real-time chat and offers over WebSockets, live notifications over SSE, Google and Apple sign-in, Stripe payments with an in-app wallet and seller payouts, nearby search on a map, and direct image uploads to S3/R2. Underneath it runs on Postgres with Drizzle, Redis for caching, and BullMQ for background jobs.

TypeScript Bun Hono Nuxt 4 React Native (Expo) Drizzle ORM PostgreSQL Redis BullMQ Stripe Cloudflare WebSockets OpenAPI

About

I'm a developer based in Tirana, Albania, and I've been building things for the web for close to ten years. I started out in design and CMS work, got pulled into JavaScript and then TypeScript, and never really looked back. Lately I split my time between running my own products and the deeper native and AI work I'd always wanted an excuse to do. I've shipped plenty on my own and plenty inside teams, and I'm happy either way. Mostly I just like building things that people actually end up using.

Selected Projects

staff.al
React Native Node.js MongoDB Cross-platform

A React Native app for staff scheduling, backed by a Node.js API. It handles shifts in real time, lets staff message each other, flags scheduling conflicts on its own, and runs on both iOS and Android. I worked directly with the client and their business side rather than picking up predefined engineering tickets: understanding the actual business problem, discussing and clarifying the requirements, translating them into the implementation, building it, and shipping it to production on a weekly release cadence.

ReserveBar reservebar.com
Next.js NestJS MongoDB GCP Temporal Stripe

A premium spirits e-commerce platform that runs storefronts for several retail brands. The storefronts and internal dashboards are Next.js and React, the services are NestJS on Google Cloud, payments run through Stripe, and orders are fulfilled in real time across a network of retailers.

Experience

  • ReserveBar (Liquid Commerce) 2022 – 06/2026

    Full-Stack JavaScript Developer

    I helped build and maintain a premium spirits e-commerce platform that serves several retail brands. On the backend I worked on NestJS microservices with MongoDB, Postgres, and Cloud Spanner on Google Cloud (Cloud Run, GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage), with Temporal running the long-lived order and fulfillment workflows. That order workflow is a durable state machine that coordinates fraud checks, inventory, payments, tax, refunds, and fulfillment, and my part of it was mostly making the financial steps safe to resume and retry, plus the recovery paths for orders that got stuck. I also wrote the heavier relational queries across orders, order items, retailers, and partners, like working out remaining stock per retailer in real time, together with the indexes and schema migrations they needed. The rest of my time went to Pulumi for the infrastructure, customer storefronts and internal dashboards in Next.js, React, Tailwind, and Radix UI with Playwright end-to-end tests, Stripe payments, third-party integrations (ShipStation, GoPuff, DoorDash, Avalara), inventory across the different retailers, and the real-time order-fulfillment flow, on a high-traffic platform we kept at around 99.9% uptime.

  • Landmark Technologies 11/2021 – 2022

    Full-Stack JavaScript Developer

    Full-stack work with Vue.js and Node.js across a mix of client projects and internal tools.

  • Pagus Group 2020 – 11/2021

    JavaScript Developer

    Frontend developer on a small team. I owned the Vue.js side while the backend team handled the Laravel REST APIs, and together we shipped custom closed-source projects for clients.

  • Confidential Italian Company 2020 – 2021

    Freelance Full-Stack Developer

    I took ownership of delivering an internal CRM and support application, built with Django and PostgreSQL. It had authenticated users and role-based permissions: technical users could reach customer tickets, look through the ticket information and the images attached to it, and provide solutions and updates on them. Authentication ran on Django's built-in auth system. Over the year it ran I was in direct contact with the client, translating their requests into the backend and frontend work.

  • Freelance (Upwork) 2019 – 2020

    Web Developer

    Spent close to a year working remotely for a US company, mostly on CMS platforms. This is where I started picking up JavaScript frameworks like Vue.js.

  • Evolve Studio 2017 – 2019

    CMS Developer

    My first developer job. I started in WordPress, customizing and building themes (one of which we sold on Envato Market), and later picked up PrestaShop, Drupal, and Magento to build all kinds of client sites.