- october 2026
eight days in. lately i've been working on a helper in anara that can teach you anything.
- september 2026
kept building diri, and started pr-skill alongside it.
- august 2026
launched diri on aug 4, a terminal app for agents. i made it to scratch my own itch, not to compete with anyone. around the same time i built the anara ios app in two weeks and a weekend, and it's doing quite well.
- july 2026
traveled a bit this summer. at the end of the month i wrote problems you can only outgrow, about how the pressure you feel can be a sign that your current goals have gotten too small.
- june 2026
- may 2026
smaller things after the redesign. code-reviewer and this site took most of my public commits.
- april 2026
wrapped up almost four months of agent 3.0 and the redesign. i also started code-reviewer, a tool for reviewing code.
- march 2026
a third month of agent 3.0, redesigning anara and the thinking behind it.
- february 2026
agent 3.0 kept going, redesigning anara piece by piece. on the side i launched penflow, an animated handwriting renderer, and released family taste skill the day before.
- january 2026
started on agent 3.0 at anara: a new ux for the agent, and rethinking most of the product around it.
- december 2025
started vinculum, an ai tutor for each student, after trying to build it three times before. i also wrote the year-end review and a few essays, and worked on this site.
- november 2025
hive came together this month, a small open source cli for running several agents on several tasks in parallel so they don't step on each other.
- october 2025
- september 2025
back from sf and on anara, with more work on the ubb schedule that syncs with google calendar.
- august 2025
we launched agents 2.0 at anara. then my first trip to the us, to san francisco. it felt like a different world, the kind of place you go if you want to build something.
- july 2025
my first full month at anara, polishing ui and pushing features.
- june 2025
exam session, and then i joined clujhouse and started at anara as a design engineer.
- may 2025
a lot of pull request review on the ubb marketplace project, and a visit from max and aavash from deta, who came to romania for a few days.
- april 2025
more of the ubb team project, which continued in a new repo, plus a couple of swift experiments.
- march 2025
the month our ubb software engineering team project was in full swing, with 43 pull requests opened. on the side i rebuilt family's drawer in pure swiftui.
- february 2025
i met the clujhouse folks and we kept in touch. i also launched optima, an ai that roasts your workouts and my first real app, but it flopped: i barely marketed it, it got seven users, and then it died. and we published our second book, informatics problems for ubb admission.
- january 2025
started exploring my own things, with a lot of swiftui. i built palora, my first swiftui app, which pulls colors out of the camera feed in real time.
- december 2024
deta surf reached v0.1.0 in early december, after a year of prototyping, and this was my last month on it. the rest went to advent of code, uni and the yearly review.
- november 2024
surf was picking up a nice following. on the side, uni coursework and a new llm-from-scratch project.
- october 2024
surf and uni again, plus a lot of machine learning: a rust version of a small mlp and a makemore project. the essay 'are you asking your why?' went out on october 20.
- september 2024
back from berlin and still on surf, with some time back on competitive programming in the cp repo.
- august 2024
the rest of the summer in berlin, with most of the work going into surf.
- july 2024
summer in berlin, building surf in person with the team, which was amazing. i also published 'look where you aim', on keeping your eyes on the goal the way a driver looks through a corner.
- june 2024
passed all my exams, then went to berlin for the whole summer to work on surf with the deta team. i also wrote two short posts: 'becoming a cracked eng.', a reading list, and 'luck', on creating your own luck through persistence.
- may 2024
more surf alongside uni. i also published 'becoming great', a personal guide to locking in: small daily habits across mind, body, spirit and money, written up after testing them for a while.
- april 2024
deta pivoted to a new prototype this month, a browser that later became deta surf. i led it from the start: designing it, prototyping ideas and building it. it began as figma concepts and tldraw sketches.
- march 2024
still balancing work and uni, with side experiments in animation and lists: a virtualized list, a framer motion button and a continuity transition.
- february 2024
a quieter month, split between part-time work at deta and university coursework in the ubb repo.
- january 2024
juggling deta and uni. back to swiftui at the start of the year, with a few small prototypes, including a split view example i put on github in mid-january.
- december 2023
still deep in the first semester. i did advent of code, wrote a short guide to setting up git and github on the command line, a list of the companies i'd most like to work for, and closed the year with a recap.
- november 2023
the first semester of uni was the heaviest, and most of my commits went to ubb, my coursework. i also started learning about deep learning, building small things like lilgrad, and wrote about agi and why i think it should be built faster rather than slowed down.
- october 2023
deta space launched publicly on the 10th, after almost two years of intense work for me. the same month i started university in cluj, studying computer science, and moved to a smaller part-time role at deta.
- september 2023
i built hani, a minimal hacker news reader, and kept working on beacon. i also wrote about how video games got me into design, and then into programming.
- august 2023
most of the month went into beacon, an app for viewing, building and sending invoices. i also made driving map, a visualizer for my trips.
- july 2023
the summer i fell in love with code. deta space had a marketplace of apps, and i worked a lot on its ux, thinking of it like an app store for a new kind of app. i made some apps for it too, stacks among them, and one of them went viral on x.
- june 2023
exam month. i took a step back from big projects for the high-school finals, which went well, and got into university. a few small swiftui and loading-spinner experiments still happened on the side.
- may 2023
a quiet month, with most of my time going to studying for the baccalaureate. i wrote a short essay on performance, with sleep at the top of the list.
- april 2023
i started learning swiftui again, by building small things. the eyeballing game came out this month, a game where you guess design values by eye, and i also made flip to refresh, an ios-style interaction.
- march 2023
bento cards went out this month, along with a figma tutorial on how to build them. a lot of the work went into this site, and i started writer, a markdown editor.
- february 2023
i made a small game for cracking arc invite codes and put it out at the end of the month. i also worked on deta's space docs.
- january 2023
i traveled a bit at the start of the year, then locked in on studying for the baccalaureate, which is why github goes quiet. still working at deta, and more of a coder there this year.
- december 2022
the 2022 year review went up on the 31st, and about half of the month's public commits went into this site. i also started advent of code 2022 again.
- november 2022
got my driving license, and started driving on the 28th. otherwise just small apps: this site, wordle, meshgrad and a new algorithms repo.
- october 2022
back to arc boost market and romanian wordle this month, with some work on this site too.
- september 2022
a month of small experiments: a swiftui card, an airpods parallax page, a fidget card and boomerang cards.
- august 2022
meshgrad went live on the 5th, a gradient generator, and i started a cmdk repo this month too.
- july 2022
deta took most of the summer, and on the side i built arc boost market, an extension store, with light switch going up alongside it.
- june 2022
the summer was mostly deta. public code was quieter, mostly rust: a rust book repo and an awesome rust list, with some more work on wordle and this site.
- may 2022
i joined deta this month, the company behind deta space, and worked on design for its new personal cloud. in 2022 i was more of a designer there. i also worked through the missing semester course from mit, kept in its own repo.
- april 2022
my time at landmarks wrapped up around now, and i got the offer from deta. most of my public commits went into this site.
- march 2022
keep the streak went out on the 15th, a small side project i shipped that month. wordle and this site kept getting steady commits too.
- february 2022
i built freight scorer, a ftc scoring tool for esentza robotics, my team, which went to the national stage that year. on the 26th i also started a browser extension prototype with pondorasti.
- january 2022
still at landmarks, where i stayed from november until about april. winter also meant working with my school's robotics team, and most of my public commits went into a romanian wordle clone and this site.
- december 2021
my second month at landmarks. on the side i started my own app, inspired by bereal, where you can only talk to someone while your phones are pointing at each other. i also did advent of code 2021 and kept posting on twitter.
- november 2021
my first job: front-end engineer at landmarks, building sites for apartment complexes and real estate developers. components i wrote there are still in use today by some of the biggest developers of buildings. it was also my first taste of design engineering, with components like a compass that shows where north is from the sun's position.
- october 2021
a month of trying things: a pile of small new repos, and the start of the move toward back-end work the 2021 review describes.
- september 2021
i started a covid stats dashboard this month, rocovidtracker, which is the covid tracker on my work page.
- august 2021
started cretu.dev on the 4th, the site you are looking at now. i also spent the month on clones and tutorials, facebook, hulu and a few other sites, and those pretty much got me hired.