About

In 2013 when I was in the 11th grade, I attended the National Contest Infoeducație where I won 2nd place in a team with a good friend of mine, Radu Mantu, with an autonomous robot project. I was in charge of designing the electronics and mechanics of the project. It was then the moment when I decided to follow a career in Electronics Engineering and understood that “the most interesting areas for scientific work are the boundary regions between disciplines” (Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture).

But this was not the first time I got to dwell in the electronics world. Since I was 12, I had been spending time with my dad hacking old electronic devices such as radios, TVs, or clocks and later on starting to do my own electronic hacks. My other interests include cycling, which I have been doing for as long as I can remember, mountain hiking, and solving Rubik’s cube.

Prototyping

1st and 2nd year of university were the days when I directed my full attention towards learning. I studied in depth the fundamentals of electromagnetics, electronics, circuit board design, or passive components. Back in those days, I had no vision of how all this knowledge blends into the design of a final product but I had in mind what Steve Jobs said at the Stanford Commencement Speech that “you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward”.

The purpose of the projects listed in this category was solely learning from trial and error. During the 1st and 2nd years of university, I used roughly every concept I was reading or learning about as a starting point for small hardware applications. However, after two years I felt like I needed to work more on a project-based approach, and unfortunately, the university was not providing enough of this so I started looking someplace else.

Hacking
Prototyping
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