Hello 👋

My name is Lucian Țîrcă (pronounced t͡sɨrkə) and I am a Software Engineer living in Copenhagen, Denmark. I graduated with a MSc of Computer Science from DIKU, University of Copenhagen in 2019. I currently work as a Functional Programmer for Abacus Medicines where I build trading platforms for medicines.

I am originally from Romania, and moved to Denmark in 2010 after finishing high school. I've been programming professionally since around 2012 and am quite passionate about it, and on this blog I intend to share my passion by posting about small projects, learnings and opinions on the technologies I worked with. I've often found other tech blogs to be very helpful along the way, and I hope that this little corner of the Internet can be helpful for you.

I also enjoy Mathematics (I picked math-focused courses during my Graduate studies) and algorithms, and solve programming challenges in my free time. While I'm not proficient enough to write proofs, I can usually follow the specific literature and can model problems mathematically. I've recently taken an interest in Optimization, and have lately been using it in my projects.

My journey

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WORK

STUDY

Functional Programmer

Abacus Medicine

Full-stack development (mostly back-end) for trading platforms of medicines using OCaml. Developing Linear Programming models for maximizing the profitability of our trades and coding them up in Gurobi/GLPK.

Software Engineer

Maersk

Built backend services and DevOps automation to improve container shipping logistics.

Streamed millions of transport events per day via Kafka and MassTransit, enabling real-time vessel load planning and anomaly detection.
Designed, deployed, and operated .NET Core microservices in Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS) with infrastructure managed using Terraform.
Delivered observability via Application Insights, implemented multi-environment CI/CD pipelines, and maintained Azure Service Bus integrations.

2024

Functional Programmer

Motorola Solutions

Worked on the SmartConnect Gateway, a soft real-time system connecting on-premise Astro P25 radio networks to LTE users via the public cloud:

Developed high-availability cloud infrastructure using Elixir, RabbitMQ, Redis, and Kubernetes, meeting strict FedRAMP High security standards.
Deployed security-enhanced Docker containers via Helm across multi-region Kubernetes clusters.
Implemented monitoring with Grafana and the ELK stack, participated in a global PagerDuty on-call rotation, and conducted blue-green production deployments.

2022

Software Developer

Freelance

After graduating University, I worked on a few projects related to data/architecture migrations in C# and Azure for Cloudeon and Nordic API Gateway(now MasterCard) and started off as self-employed where I built an integration between Ansys SpaceClaim and HighStage. However, the world changed unexpectedly: the Covid pandemic started, and I abandoned my attempt at consulting.

2020

Teaching Assistant

University of Copenhagen

I assisted with 2 separate courses: Computer Graphics and Applied Programming, both in C++. For Computer Graphics I assisted exercise sessions with theory and implementation in C++/OpenGL related to rendering, projective transforms and parametric surfaces. In Applied Programming, I supported 100 non-Computer Science students with their assignments related to Linear Algebra and Object-Oriented programming.

2019

MSc Computer Science

University of Copenhagen

During this period I picked math-focused courses related to Machine Learning and Simulation. Programmed in Python for most of the topics, and was introduced to Functional Programming using Haskell and Erlang.

Master Thesis: Created pipeline for generating synthetic data using the Box2D Rigid Body Physics simulation library which was then used to train a Convolutional Neural Network developed in pyTorch and would predict warm starts for the Linear Complementarity Problem used to compute forces at each frame of the simulation.

2018

Student Software Developer

HighStage A/S

Project: Created Windows Installer (.msi) setup for the HighStage product using WiX. Features include: SQL database setup, Windows User provisioning, IIS configuration, SMB shares and file permissions, unattended command line installation.

Project: Designed and implemented generic client for the XLedger finance management system. Converted XML+XSD supplied by the web API to SQL tables that mirror the requested information. C# MetaProgramming using Reflection and T4 templates in order to generate SOAP Clients for existing endpoints using the WSDL schema supplied

2016

BSc IT, Communication and New Media

Aalborg University Copenhagen

Engineering studies structured with a Project-Oriented Problem-Based Learning model. Built peer-to-peer audio streaming Java app, Home lighting system using Raspberry Pi and Arduino, 2D game using Java and OpenGL. Was interested in DevOps and computer infrastructure, so I picked that for the final project.

Bachelor thesis: Deployed Multi-VM Win2012 AD Forest, IIS web application + MSSQL database using Powershell DSC and Puppet for Configuration Management, custom-built Vagrant plugin (ruby gem + PowerShell module) for the network layer (managing DHCP + network topology), Vagrant for orchestration on HyperV, VMWare and VirtualBox backends and Packer for base image creation.

2015

Web Developer

Leadmill ApS

Designed and built a JavaScript library performing link replacement and image tagging functionality on pages that embedded our JavaScript files. Script was generated on-the-fly for each request depending on request information and policies stored in our internal database. Image tags looked and performed similarly on any page (and responsive to window resize/mobile-friendly).

2013

2012

Associate's Degree

KEA Copenhagen

Learned how to program in Java and Android. I completed the Associate's Degree with a unpaid internship at Leadmill ApS where I was hired afterwards.

The first programming language I used for work was JavaScript, before Node.js and npm were a thing (better said - before I knew of their existence). I can't say I've used too many frameworks or libraries except maybe jQuery. Nowadays I mostly use js-of-ocaml for building Frontends.

My experience with Object-Oriented-Programming is mostly in C# (I used Java in a few projects, and I would argue they are very similar). I used it most recently at Maersk where I used MassTransit for event streaming applications. I intend to write a few blog posts here exploring concurrency and generics.

My go-to language right now for full stack development (and more) is OCaml. I'm quite fond of its pragmatic way of allowing for functional and imperative style, and I really like the fact that it can be transpiled to JavaScript.

I worked for Motorola Solutions for 2 years building soft-realtime cloud backends for hand-held radios using Elixir. Here I learned how to build and deploy systems with high security requirements and five nines availability into the company's custom-built Kubernetes clusters.

PowerShell is my favourite shell, mostly because of its object-based pipeline model. I know it's not the most popular choice, but I find it much more expressive than traditional string-based shells.

I used Python during my studies, where I got to program using numpy, pandas, pytorch, matplotlib and other Data Science libraries. I loved the literate programming style of Jupyter Notebooks and playing with data, but unfortunately never got to use these libraries as part of my job. However, I do prefer type-safe languages for production applications.

For Infrastructure-as-Code I really like Terraform, and used it professionally at Maersk for provisioning Azure infrastructure. Our team was using the "You Build It, You Run It" set-up, and so it included Software Engineering, DevOps and SRE responsibilities.

I used Kubernetes for around 4 years professionally at Motorola Solutions and Maersk deploying and managing microservices and performing SRE responsiblities