Lucian Photo

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

This section is best experienced on a wider screen. Hover over the timeline and logos for additional details.

WORK
STUDY
2024
2022
2020
2019
2018
2016
2015
2013
2012

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