Early days

I was born in August 1975 in Brasov, Romania. I went to kindergarten, primary school, elementary school, high school and college in Brasov.

My interest in computer science started in 1989 when I was admitted to the Computer Science High School in Brasov. As with many important things in life, my passion for computer science was an accident: the only reason I went to the Computer Science High School was that many of my friends decided to go there. 

Computer Science Contests 

Until the age of 14, I was a mediocre student in all subjects except foreign languages, so I surprised everybody (including myself) when in my second high school year I qualified for the Romanian National Computer Science Olympiad and won an Honorable Mention. The funny thing is that the Olympiad was only the third time I'd ever touched a PC, and the only reason my program was not running perfectly was that I  had accidentally deleted some lines of code and did not know how to use 'undo' to get them back. I continued to participate in various national computer science contests and won a bunch of prizes. I wasn't good enough to qualify for Romania's national team for international contests though.

Teaching High School

In 1995 my former high school computer science teacher, Delia Garbacea, left for the US and left me as "inheritance" her exceptional class of high school kids. I thus became a teacher at my former high school when I was a 3rd year university student! I  taught there for three years, until the kids in my class graduated in 1998. My first years as a teacher were a memorable experience, and the excellent results obtained by some of my best students in computer science contests gave me great satisfaction.

Teaching at Transilvania University

After graduating from the Computer Science section of the Transilvania University of Brasov in 1997, I was offered an Assitant Professor position. During 1997-1998 I was a high school teacher, an assistant professor and a masters student at the same time. In 1998 I completed my MSc degree, and stopped teaching at the high school.

I continued teaching at the University for another 4 years. I gave lectures and seminars on various topics, including C, C++, Object Oriented Programming, Algorithms, Data Structures, and Java. You can find some materials I wrote while teaching in the Books and Lectures section.

In 1999 I became a PhD student at the Babes-Bolyai University, and graduated in 2004.

Shifting to Software Engineer

During my 4 years at the university, the pleasure of teaching was gradually diminished by silly bureaucracy and lax admission rules, so I decided to shift careers and enter the more competitive field of software engineering. Between 2000 and 2002 I co-founded and then left Delsyne Software, and from 2002-2004 I worked as an independent consultant, mainly for Lund Performance Solutions. My real software engineering work started in early 2005, when I joined Google as a Java Software Engineer. I have worked on Google Base, Google Video and recently the YouTube Apis.