Tiberiu Petre — Software Engineer on Tiberiu Petre - Software Engineer

Sovereign AI Nexus

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A small, self-hosted FastAPI + PostgreSQL + React platform for AI-assisted chat and generated artifacts — built incrementally, no metered API costs. Backend + AI Platform Engineering portfolio piece.

Sovereign AI Nexus, Part 1: Starting Small, On Purpose

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I’ve had portfolio project ideas for Backend and AI Engineering before — written at different times, each answering the same question differently: do I position myself for a specific role, or build what I find interesting and let the résumé follow?

None of them got built. Not because the ideas were bad — the architectures were actually fairly detailed — but because each one tried to prove too much at once: a backend split across multiple languages “to show I know them all,” telemetry, observability, multi-agent orchestration, all in the same first version. The kind of scope that feels good on paper and turns overwhelming right when you’d need to write the first line of code.

Sovereign AI Nexus, Part 2: What Broke While Scaffolding

Thu, 20 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The first post in this series was about the decision — why I’m starting small, why the earlier project ideas never got built. This one is about the day I actually wrote code, and about what broke along the way — because almost nothing worked on the first try, and I think that part is more interesting than if it had gone perfectly.

The scaffold itself

For the backend I used FastAPI and uvicorn, managed with uv — fast, and about as simple as it gets to wire up: a @app.get(path="/") decorator over the handler function. For the frontend, React and TypeScript, scaffolded with Vite.

About this blog

Wed, 19 Aug 2026 00:00:00 +0000

This site is written by me, but not entirely without help.

The articles here — project retrospectives, technical write-ups — are drafted with AI assistance (currently Claude): I give it the source material (code, old CVs, notes, conversation), it researches, structures, and drafts the prose, and I review, correct, and edit before anything gets published. That’s a different relationship than spell-check or grammar cleanup on something I wrote first — the wording itself is usually AI-drafted, not human-typed-then-polished.

Developing a Ray Tracer Using Compute Shaders

Fri, 21 Jan 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Originally published on Medium, January 2022. Republished here with light edits — the original project’s source code no longer exists, only this write-up survived, so the code snippets below are described rather than shown.

A ray-tracer is a rendering method that simulates light reflections, refractions and shadows. It follows a light path from a specific source and computes each pixel in the image to simulate the effect of the light.

Cindy's Adventures — Spiders in Australia

Tue, 02 Nov 2021 00:00:00 +0000

A Game Off 2021 jam entry — an action-adventure chapter where a spell-casting sorceress fights off a spider infestation in rural Australia, built solo in Unreal Engine within the jam’s one-month window.

COVID-19 Predictors

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Two coursework predictors for COVID-19 case trends — a neural network compared against ARIMA and Prophet in one, a scikit-learn regression model reframed as OHLC-style candles in the other.

EvoAgents

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

AI framework using behavior trees for NPC decision-making — an action-adventure game with procedurally generated terrain, built as a bachelor’s thesis.

InfoTest

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

HackerRank-style code evaluation platform — Python-based evaluator, Laravel/PHP/MySQL backend, Dockerized. Applied, academic-scope SQL/backend experience.

Optimization Algorithms for Camera Coverage

Tue, 12 Oct 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Comparing Hill Climbing (with and without retrace) against Simulated Annealing for maximizing three ceiling cameras’ coverage area — Simulated Annealing won.

GrilaTV

Wed, 05 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Relational database design and normalization for a TV-guide domain, redocumented across two semester iterations, Dockerized deployment. Applied, academic-scope schema-design experience.

EvoCMS

Sun, 02 Feb 2020 00:00:00 +0000

A Laravel 6 content-management system built around a plugin/theme architecture — service-provider-based plugins and swappable themes instead of hardcoded features.

EvoPASS — An Android Password Manager (2019, Retrospective)

Tue, 01 Oct 2019 00:00:00 +0000

Retrospective note, written in 2026. Unlike the ray tracer post, there’s no surviving Medium article or gist for this one — the source below is everything that’s left: a few CV bullet points from October 2019, no source code, no repository. Rather than let it disappear entirely, here’s what those bullet points describe.

EvoPASS was a university project built during my Computer Science studies at Petroleum-Gas University of Ploiești — an Android password manager written in Kotlin.

Console Maze Generator

Fri, 22 Feb 2019 00:00:00 +0000

A randomized depth-first-search maze generator, animated live in a Windows console, with Dijkstra’s algorithm tracing the shortest path once generation finishes.