02 my story
I'm just a guy who's trying to get where he must by doing what he likes. Sometimes it works out.
As I was saying earlier, I was born on June 18th, 1977 in Blaj, Romania.
I learned to read and write when I was about five years old, and I became interested in computers when I was only seven, going on to write my first computer program two years later, in 1986. That was before I had even seen a personal computer -- indeed, before most people anywhere had. So, one could say that I evolved together with them. As you can guess, I was the stay-home-with-a-book kind of kid.
My mother is a former teacher of Mathematics, and my father was an artist who taught Photography and Painting. I also have an older sister named Lili, and she has two kids, Valentina and Traian. They live in the United States.
As a child, I had what they call a "feeble constitution"; this worried my parents, so they decided to sign me up into some sport programmes. I tried some athletics for a while; I wasn't so bad, and I had a good teacher, but I didn't like it too much. I then tried wrestling, but gave up when I accidentally threw a wrestling dummy up on top of me and ended up with a nosebleed. Eventually, my parents sent me to an illegal (yes, the Communism regime had it banned!) martial arts course.
Traditional karate became a very important part of my life, and I guess in many ways it still is. It has taught me how to know myself, while computer programming taught me how to operate with that knowledge. We used to study katas after nightfall on the deserted streets of Blaj, and later, clandestinely, in a school gym where we lied saying that we're doing gymnastics. My sensei was Vasile Tomșa, and I'd really like to know what became of him. He was one of the leading figures of the 1989 Revolution in my hometown, and received some honours for that, but then he simply vanished. I owe him a lot, and I'd like to say thanks.
So yes, secondary school meant, among others, the end of Communism. During the Revolution, I was banned from standing near the apartment windows, for fear of stray bullets. Back then I thought it was all very exciting, but today, as a parent, I definitely see those days with different eyes.
Anyway: the Revolution, or coup d'état or whatever the hell it was, eventually provided me with access to better computers, a better guitar, and the beginnings of the Internet. When my school got a 2400 baud modem, I used to sneak in at three in the morning and dial into BBS nodes -- the predecessors of the predecessors of the Web.
As soon as I could get myself a decent modem (14.4kbps -- about a billion times slower than today's fiber optics) I set up my own BBS named BlueBoard (I was into blue things back then and signed software as BlueSoft), and I ran that all the way through high-school, until I was well at the University (pulling strings there for a free UUCP connection so that my emails should take less than a week to deliver...)
In high-school I studied Computer Science, and I certainly learned a lot more programming there than later at the University. I surprised everybody in the ninth grade by solving a problem at the Olympics using a matrix indexed by elements of arrays which were indexed by another matrix. This threw me into the Nationals, where despite some rather poor programming, I came out in the top six. At the time I saw that as a great achievement; today, with my daughter already a multiple national dancing champion and an accomplished instructor, it just makes me smile.
I started my first band, and also played with a couple of others. I was lead guitar, but also keyboards for a little while, and managed to win first prize in a contest. I was (and still am) very pretentious with what I listen to, and due to a very good audio memory and sharp ear, I learn music very easily.
Contrasting my good hearing (and sense of smell), the video dimension is very poorly developed with me. I was born with a condition called aphantasia (yes, it does exist, look it up). It means I have no visual memory capabilities whatsoever, and I am incapable of forming an image in my mind. Over years I've developed a replacement mechanism that helps me identify people I see often. However, that still leaves me very embarrassed when I don't recognize people I've just met, such as the waiter in the restaurant or a new cute employee in the lift.
Faced with this problem -- most of my friends learned by xeroxing a book page in their heads, which I never could -- I never did too well in school, except for foreign languages and programming.
I've always been in love with all foreign languages. I started with English when I was eight, then German at ten, and outside school I started learning Swedish when I was thirteen. Since then, I've caught up more or less with a few others. I started learning Czech in 2007, and Norwegian a few years later, but switched back to Swedish because it was easier to practice. It also turned out useful once I moved to Sweden! Because Czech adjectives proved a bit of a challenge, I switched over Mandarin Chinese, where of course grammar is a breeze; my initial intention was to make Czech look easy once I'd get back to it.
It was also in high-school when I got my first job: I taught an entry-level computer course. Looking back today, I'd love to be able to see me doing that...
When the time came to go to the University, I first tried Economics, and gave up because I couldn't learn anything mechanically. I then tried with Geography, and failed even more miserably -- I couldn't remember a map if I had it painted on the back of my eyelids. So my mum did the only thing left for her to do: locked me up for two months and worked with me for ten hours a day, teaching me just enough Maths to get me into the Faculty of Mathematics and Computer Science of the Babes-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca.
I did OK at all three exams and I moved to Cluj-Napoca to be a student.
The first year was pretty boring -- back then the curriculum of the faculty was mostly (and aberrantly) useless -- and so I mostly just hovered around the big computers, having a good time and not knowing what to do. One day I was pretending to be doing something in the lab and the then director of the Communications Center, dr. Boian, walked in, twice my size and very nervous, and threw me out on account of my age (and, I suppose, my state of panic).
Exactly one year later -- learning from an assistant that I showed some interest in hacking the university's SMTP servers -- he offered me a job in the University's Communications Centre, where I worked for the next couple of years or so. This -- not school -- is what I did in Cluj-Napoca. At the Centre I was dial-up chief, network administrator, often developer, and generally did stuff ranging from drilling holes in walls to configuring HTTP proxy servers on RedHat 4 boxes.
Health and family problems urged my return to Blaj, where I started working in various places: a mobile phones store, a local radio station, or doing DTP for a living. Soon, with my good friend, Silviu Margin, we started our own ISP and computers shop, which didn't do too bad considering the horrible economic situation; also, at the same time, I started teaching programming at a high-school and at a local college.
This ISP business came out pretty neat. Our servers handled post-paid and pre-paid customers, had a billing system with real-time customer care, we had both dial-up and leased line, web/ftp presence and a fairly good QoS system. Everything was developed in-house; we didn't have to pay for a single line of code.
So I was now a teacher-developer-designer-netadmin-publisher, and on top of that, I took up music a bit more seriously and recorded a few songs in a more professional environment.
Another event related to this is the invitation that I've received from the Romanian Radio League to Bucharest, regarding a piece a software that I had developed during the past few years, that apparently had made easier the lives of many people from many countries. That was my first visit to Bucharest, and it lasted for 2 days. (In those days travel wasn't what it is today.) I was overly impressed by the appreciation shown to me, and I continued working on that software until 16-bit platforms became obsolete.
One Christmas night, a former high-school mate got so upset over how little money I was making for all these things, that he actually convinced me to send my CV to Vodafone Romania (then called Connex). To my surprise, I was invited to Bucharest for an interview, which lasted for seven hours and consisted of five sessions. And so, in February 2002 I moved to Bucharest, as Services Developer in a department called Technology and Services Development.
During my years at Vodafone I did work that involved technical relations with vendors, software development, some design, audio recording and editing, video work, even directing and scripting a couple of ads, something called "VIP skills" and generally a lot more than I thought I'd do, when I took the job. Later, I made a lateral step in my career, moving to the Marketing department, where I worked as a Consumer Market Project Manager. I was in charge with the company's youth web portal, and then with the video streaming part of another portal.
Soon I got really tired of the corporate way of doing things and, almost a year later, I returned to IT, joining an awesome team of professionals: Modulo Consulting. And another year later, I became the Managing Director of the Romanian branch of a Belgian software company named Twodecode Technologies.
Apart from the job, after I came to Bucharest I tried joining a number of rock groups, but hardly found the time to commit to music. I joined an excellent Wado Ryu club (learning from sensei Nukina Nobuyuki - 4 dan, former national champion in they very Japan), but after a few months I developed severe nerve problems in my left elbow and couldn't keep up. I currently hold a green belt (3 more left before the black one, in case you're wondering). In Sweden I've done Ju-Jutsu for a while, but the absolute ban on any kind of kicking or hitting felt a bit wrong.
Becoming quite tired of the capital city, we moved back to Transylvania, where I started my own IT outsourcing company, Indigenious Development. My old friend Raul Radu soon joined me as co-owner and he's been keeping the shop open to this day.
I got married once, in a civil ceremony in 2002. Unfortunately that proved to be a mistake which cost us a long divorce. Two years later, I married a SMURD emergency doctor named Carmen (she's a very capable, smart, strong but delicate woman and I must remember to bring her flowers more often), and she is now sleeping 2 steps away to my left.
In 2004 I published a book on the philosophy of web development, called "Programarea Web... altfel".
2005 saw the birth of our first child -- a girl named Alexandra. She fell in love with dance and started taking lessons when she was only five. These days she's an instructor with her own dance group, having won a bucket of medals solo, with her partner, or with her students.
In late 2009 I found out that I suffered from the coeliac disease. This actually turned out to be no big deal. Giving up gluten bread was a breeze; it was pizza that I missed the most. I kept the diet for about six years, then repeated the tests. They came out negative, which was somewhat of a surprise, considering that the coeliac disease is generally considered to be incurable.
On April 18th, 2010, my wife gave birth to our son, Matei Răzvan. So with that, we're a family of four. For a while, Matei was an avid reader and burned through the Harry Potter novels (in Swedish) in a single summer when he was eight -- and then re-read them at least ten times each. After trying out passions that included digital video editing and something called Roblox which shows up on my monthly bank statement, he's settled on aiming to become a car mechanic.
In 2012 I completed a course in Journalism (graduating with the single maximum mark), after having produced my first short documentary in 2010, about my hometown. It's called "Sunrise of Romanians" and, if you have ten minutes, you can watch it at
SunriseOfRomanians.com.
I've always been fascinated by helicopters. I started flying in June 2009, on a Romanian-made ultralight plane (the Aerostar Festival). I kept a blog about that. But I soon had to accept that I was really still dreaming of helicopters, and I decided to give it up after only twenty-three flight hours.
And so, in March 2012 I started a serious, proper helicopter flight school, and there's
a blog about that too. I graduated the Romanian Aviation Academy, passed the exams and I am now a licensed private helicopter pilot. In addition to that, here in Sweden I'm a member of the Skånska Gyrokopterklubben, where I fly gyrocopters.
In October 2013,
my second book got published. It's an illustrated thriller novel written in Romanian (with fantastic drawings by Darius Panaite), about a pilot taken hostage in a rather original manner, and who is recovered in an even more original manner. And that made me an
Amazon Author .
My third book was in English, and it was a sci-fi novel. It's called Starship Doi, and it's about a Dacian, a medieval young girl and a modern day Englishman, plus an alien starship. It's received very good reviews from readers, who demanded a sequel.
That sequel became my fourth book, which is called Starship Doi: Wars. People seem to like this one, too. Let me know what you think, if you decide to try it out.
I'm currently working on my fifth book, which has the title "Missing from Heaven" and isn't really sci-fi.
So, where was I? In late 2015 we left Romania, and our country is now Sweden. In 2019 I stopped working as a consultant, and got a job as an IT Systems Architect and Team Leader at Husqvarna. And in 2023 I got recruited as a Software Manager at Saab, where I combine three of my passions -- programming, flying, and leadership -- into making flying software.
Incidentally, I'm also a soldier in the Swedish Home Guard, where I train a few times a year with my friends in green clothes.
All things considered, I've had a good life so far, and I plan to make the best of every moment. I don't waste too much time planning, because, as a man I otherwise dislike said, "life is what happens while you're busy making other plans". All we have is the now, and I intend to make the best of every fraction of now that I have.
