Conducting research in datamining and distributed systems for news gathering and data mining for newistic.com.
2007Research in distributed fault-tolerant content delivery networks for geoscaling.com. Also building a hosted service that provides geographically aware DNS services. Unlike standard DNS servers, it can redirect visitors to the best/closest mirror of a distributed web service based on their country of origin.
2006Built a distributed data storage framework, as part of a research project. It was used as a storage component for datamining research conducted in the summer of 2006. The resulting research paper is available on request.
2005Wrote a Downloads Search Engine. It scans 6-7 downloads websites continuously for new products. The search engine organizes the products in "download nodes" by grouping download sources and different versions of the same software. The search engine is currently licensed to Playfuls.com. Not maintained anymore, unfortunately.
PHP (Scalability) - Funded by Google to work on an open source project via their Google Summer of Code 2008 program. I will be extending the Coppermine Photo Gallery to allow flexible mirroring and distributed photo storage.
2008 » PresentPlone/Python - Internship at the Asian Human Rights Commission in Hong Kong. I am helping them them develop their Internet new website using the Plone platform, which is written in Python.
2007 » PresentPHP/MySQL - Wrote the DNS management frontend for geoscaling.com, a geographically aware DNS server that lets users manage DNS settings for their domain through a web browser.
2007PHP/MySQL - Wrote the content management system for tvkon.com, a video streaming website.
2002 » 2007PHP/MySQL - Web programmer for Playfuls Entertainment. Written most of the underlying web programming for jucaushii.ro and playfuls.com. Playfuls.com had a peak of 3 millions visitors/month and was hosted on four servers.
2001 » 2004PHP/MySQL - Worked as a web programmer at the STG NGO. My job was to write PHP frameworks for portals and e-commerce websites. Created 6 versions of the STG Portal, a framework for building content websites.
2002 » 2004PHP/MySQL - Built and maintained two portals for Radio Mix FM - Targu Mures, Romania. One version is still in production here.
Linux Administrator and Programmer for several clients from US and Romania. rentsmarty.net promotes my consulting services.
2006 » PresentBuilding a mission-critical infrastructure for geoscaling.com that will enable the company to provide geography-aware DNS and fault-tolerance, as well as a content delivery network.
2007Built a Linux-based solution for taking ~real-time screenshots of remote websites on demand, for cryocopy.com.
2002 » 2007Network administrator for Playfuls Entertainment (playfuls.com). Took care of 4 servers in Romania and one in Germany. Built a distributed content serving infrastructure with PHP/MySQL+Squid. Worked with database replication and file synchronization between the servers. I configured firewalls and Intrusion Detection Systems and wrote a few network monitoring scripts.
2006 » 2007Built a Linux/MPlayer/Bash-based solution for encoding any kind of video files into flv (Flash Video) streaming files, for tvkon.com.
2006 » 2007Network administrator for the STG NGO for 3 years. I worked with web servers (Apache, lighttpd), database servers (MySQL, PostgreSQL), domain-name servers (Tinydns/DjbDNS, BIND), e-mail servers (Qmail, Sendmail), Samba etc. I worked with many Linux distributions including Fedora, Debian, Suse, Slackware and Gentoo.
2001 » 2005Network administrator for "Papiu" high-school, Romania. My job consisted of managing 3 servers (2 Samba servers + Novell and one Internet gateway) for ~120 workstations scattered throught the 4-storey building. I helped the school build a wired network infrastructure to get the network on every floor.
Part of one of the finalist teams at YEurope.
2006Part of one of the winning teams at ICUBE - Innovation Initiative Incubator.
2005"Papiu" prize for academic excellence.
2001 - 2005Won 1st prize at several local computer projects contests.
Co-founder of Newistic.com, a startup working on large-scale data mining projects.
2002 » 2007Co-Founder of Playfuls Entertainment. I had several roles in the company, starting from network administrator to programmer and team manager. Sold it in 2006 to Netbridge Investments (backed by New Century Holdings), remained as a technical consultant until 2007. The main website, playfuls.com, had 3 million visitors / month at its peak.
I was one of the two trainers of a one week summer school in July 2008 about studying in the US. The goal was to inform high-school students of available undergraduate opportunities and to give practical advice on how to approach universities and fill out admission forms.
2008Taught an IT course during the Asian Human Rights Commission folkschool (human rights school). I discussed Internet-related technologies useful for human rights work. The course had a strong practical element to it.
2006I gave a talk on scaling web applications during the 2006 Forum IT Camp (link in Romanian). I presented the steps I took to gradually scale the Playfuls Entertainment news portals.
2003 » 2004I thought PHP and Linux to two high-school classes at the "Unirea" high-school and at the "Petru Maior" University, both in Targu Mures, Romania.