About

Hi. My name is Valentin-Gabriel Radu. I have always been passionate about computers and electronics. I really enjoy working long hours on stuff that I find interesting, yet I barely make the deadline when I have to work on something boring.

I have been programming since middle school (gymnasium). My first ‘big’ project that I worked on back then was a custom interface around Internet Explorer’s browser engine; then, during high school, I worked for 3 years on Pseudocode, an application that assisted my colleagues during computer science classes.

Then, in order to further advance down this path, I studied for 1 year electronic and information engineering at Imperial College London, England, where I got the opportunity to develop my electronics and embedded systems skills. Most of the time there involved developing on FPGAs and embedded systems.

After that year, I came back to Bucharest, Romania and started my undergraduate studies at the Faculty of Automatic Control and Computer Science. The 4 years spent there allowed me to vastly improve my knowledge and develop new skills, especially good proficiency with the C language, x86 assembly, Linux kernel development, working in embedded systems and microcontrollers, networking, functional programming and… physical education (I liked the subject so much that I took supplementary classes up to my third year). I have graduated the summer of 2020, with big regrets that it all ended so soon.

Recently, I tried to make the most of the situation generated by the global pandemic crisis, and started studying and working on various areas of interests for me. The period was definitely the most productive of my life, at the expense of feeling chronically tired most of the time. I developed advanced projects involving Windows OS internals and microcontrollers. I started publishing all my work on GitHub, which has helped me tremendously, by allowing my projects to get external review, help, and also help me improve my coding style, organization, and collaboration skills. You can check the projects in my Git repo here.

In the future, I am looking forward to learning more stuff, especially about cutting edge, awesome technology. For me, the ideal work environment is the one where I can work all day long towards doing extraordinary things.

During the times when I have to leave my desk and the computer, I prefer to cycle if the conditions allow for it. Also, I enjoy skiing very much, while my favorite activity that I do during the summer time is carting. I like talking to people and socializing, especially because the nature of my work does not offer that much opportunity in this regard; I am the type of guy that talks with random similarly interested people when riding the tube; I never wear headphones when walking outside.

I have a preference for ThinkPad laptops, yet I do not agree with Lenovo’s direction for the brand lately. I’d prefer their computers were libre when it comes to booting. After that, I either run Arch, either Windows. Depends on my mood and necessities. I can’t stand installing a GNU/Linux distro without picking each and every package via the command line, while if I have to keep Windows on a new computer, I always wipe it and I do a clean install using an official image.

That’d be all for now. Enjoy my web site!