MY
STORY

I was born in Bucharest, but I really grew up in the countryside, at my grandparents’ place. Bikes, fields, working with your hands. I was the kind of kid who helped everyone and noticed everything. Maybe that’s where the instinct comes from — to understand how things work, not just to know, but to be able to do.

At school I was “the tech guy.” Teachers would sometimes pull me out of class to help them with something. It wasn’t a burden — it was proof that I actually knew things.

My first serious contact with a computer happened alongside my dad, when we built one together. That moment set things in motion. I haven’t stopped since.

Around the age of 11-12 I started learning to code. Not because anyone told me it was a good idea, but because I was drawn to it and wanted to understand how what I saw on screen actually worked. YouTube, forums, trial and error. If something didn’t work, I tried again. And again. And again.

The 3D printer came as a gift, a Prusa MK2. No guide, no mentor, no “here’s how you do it.” All the slicer settings overwhelmed me at first. But within two weeks, limited by school hours, I got it dialed in and printed the first thing I was actually proud of: a keychain for my husky’s collar.

Networking came differently: the first time I configured a network from scratch, start to finish, entirely on my own. Servers followed when I discovered Proxmox and saw what was truly possible. One thread of curiosity pulls ten more behind it.

I took apart laptops and printers just to see what was inside, out of pure curiosity. If you don’t know how something is built, you can’t really control it.

IT Hero Technologies is my dad’s company. I’d been around since I was young, helping here and there. At some point I decided I wanted a Bambu Lab X1 Carbon printer, and I made up my mind to work for it, not ask for it. I worked the entire summer, saved the money and bought it myself. I don’t regret a single second of that trade-off.

Now I’m a real part of the team. At first it felt a bit strange, new faces, an environment I only knew through my dad. Now we work well together. That matters more than any title.

My dad is the reason I had access to real hardware, real projects, and real mistakes with real consequences. I’m genuinely grateful for that.

The best way to learn is to build something that actually has to work. No safety net.

At some point I started offering hosting services. Officially the company didn’t exist on paper, but the clients were real, the servers were running, the money was coming in. It was a real business, built from nothing, by myself.

The first client showed up after days of advertising. He took a chance. He bought. He was happy enough that he actually expressed his frustration when I announced I was shutting down. That says everything about what I’d built.

Why did I close? Revenue didn’t cover the costs and I didn’t have time to grow. Anyone without experience is bound to make mistakes starting out, and I was no exception. At one point the server got overloaded and a client’s services were affected. I fixed it by migrating the VPS to another node, but the lesson stuck: a system without backups isn’t a system, it’s a risk you’re choosing to accept.

My biggest fear was that no one would ever hear about me and that costs would outrun income. That’s exactly what happened. I shut it down. It’s the first chapter, not the last.

At IT Hero we wanted a chatbot to help with day-to-day work and integrate with Odoo. I was given the opportunity to use the company’s infrastructure to train an AI model completely locally, with no data leaving the building. The result is an internal assistant I built from scratch, tailored exactly to the team’s needs.

I also contributed to an open-source project: I translated RustDesk into Romanian. Through that contribution I got to familiarize myself with the process of contributing to an open-source project, which opened a path I want to keep walking.

When new technology lands on my desk, I don’t wait for someone to come explain it. I figure it out myself. Same as I always have.

The Bambu Lab X1 Carbon came after a full summer of work at IT Hero. I decided to work for it, not ask for it. It now prints PLA and PETG for client and personal projects, and every time I start it up I know exactly what it cost.

Electric off-road: Talaria XXX for terrain, Talaria Sting for everything else. It started with a test ride alongside my dad and my cousin, we loved it instantly. A few months of research later, we were owners.

On Triglav, when I saw the wall I had to climb, I thought I wasn’t coming back alive. But I did. It was one of the best adventures I’ve ever had.

12 countries across Europe. Rock, Metal, Techno through an Onkyo + Magnat setup that’s worth every penny. Ski freeride when the season allows. ATV. Paragliding.

I had a husky. He died on Saint Andrew’s Day in 2025. We’d been friends for a lifetime. I miss him.