About

My name is Andrei N. Ciobanu.

^{Myself, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, 2019}

I was born in Southern Romania, Bailesti, in 1987, two years before the fall of communism.

^{An old picture (1900) of Bailesti, the town where I was born}

My childhood was happy, very Balkan, and marked by a permanent connection to the Internet.

^{Colegiul National Carol 1, Craiova - My highschool}

Eventually, I’ve moved and currently live in Bucharest.

^{Bucharest, Romania}

I am happily married and the father of a two sweet baby girls.

I have a bachelor’s degree in Electronics, Telecommunications, and Information technology from the Polytechnic University of Bucharest (2009). I have a specialization in Computer Networks and Sofware Engineering.

^{Universitatea Politehnica, Bucharest, Romania}

I have played with math, computers, and programming languages since childhood. My parents were engineers, and they instilled in me a healthy curiosity for technology. My maternal grandfather and granduncle were math teachers, so they’ve played me into playing with numbers.

^{Me and Alexandru Muscalu, my cool grandfather math teacher}

My first ^microcomputer was one of those. All the lucky Romanian kids from 90s had them:

^{HC91, a Romanian Microcomputer}

I consider myself a generalist rather than a specialist. I know some stuff about low-level programming. I know stuff about building modern back-end systems. I’ve used many libraries and frameworks and reinvented the wheel several times.

^{View from my office, 2022}

Romanian is my native language, and I am fluent in English and French. I almost speak a fourth language; I will put it here once I become fluent.

The blog

I blog because I genuinely like programming and math.

My most popular articles so far are:

• (2021) Implementing Hash Tables in C + hn discussion
• (2021) A tale of Java Hash Tables + hn discussion
• (2021) Writing a simple 16 bit VM in less than 125 lines of C + hn discussion
• (2022) A blog that is a single executable binary + hn discussion
• (2023) Demystifying bitwise operations, a gentle C tutorial + hn discussion
• (2024) The math exams of my life + hn discussion
• (2024) The sinusoidal tetris + hn discussion

… it’s a work in progress

I’ve also started to collect interesting links. Check this section.

Tools

Blog:

• jekyll;
• minimal-mistakes;
• netlify;
• utterances.

I create the “visuals” with draw.io.

I use mathjax for math formulas.

For HTML Canvas-related stuff, I am using p5js.

Contact & Collaboration

I will be flattered to receive your email: gnomemory (with an @yahoo.com or @pm.me endings).

The opinions expressed on this blog are highly personal.