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. ...

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. ...

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. ...

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. ...