Alex is a 27 year old Romanian blogger/software developer, independent consultant/freelancer and ruby enthusiast.
When in high school he was pretty strong in Maths and won prizes to a bunch of national maths contests(and a couple of physics or informatics regional ones); that’s also how he got in without a contest into Romania’s top Computer Science University - Politehnica Bucharest. This was when he found out that he loved Computer Science a lot more than Maths which got more and more difficult while IT got more and more exciting.
During his 5th year of college he went to Paris, at Ecole Polytechnique, where he took Majors in Computer Science and a Master’s degree in Algorithms; this was the time when he discovered he enjoyed a lot more building things (aka software) than studying them (aka Computer Science).
During college he worked part-time or during internships in several IT firms (a Romanian one and 2 French ones), and after his Master’s he got a full-time job in the financial software sector at Murex S.A. Paris.
Although educational, C enterprise-level development proved soon to be a lot less exciting than he thought. So he got back to Romania where he developed several projects in Ruby on Rails (which didn’t get the fame he dreamed of), in J2ME Mobile Software(which got the fame he dreamed of, but not the money) and eventually became a freelancer and consultant in Web 2.0, Ruby, Rails and the like.
What about his projects?
In a seemingly random order, here are some of the things Alex did online:
a tiny blog network (read more on Blogs page) :
Alex Brie .net - his main website and blog - started in the autumn of 2004, having as precursors a livejournal blog and a tiny and obsolete blogspot one; one of the top 25 30 40 Romanian blogs(the number keeps changing, as more and more great blogs appear every day)
Mobicritic - an online magazine of games for mobile phones and software reviews and editor’s picks
Hack the Day - the blog that aims to improve your productivity, health, life and working habits with computer tips and tutorials, Internet and GTD recipes.
Web 2.0 projects
geokeo.com - (shut down project) a Google Maps Ajax mashup with Bucharest’s address database and a home-grown street rendering engine
ghidmobil.com - Ghid Mobil - free as in beer mobile software applications for java-enabled mobile phones - containing ebooks, touristic guides and company brochures; earned Alex press coverage in major business magazines and daily journals.
currently working on Miam.ro - a social recommendation guide, a business idea that won 4th place at the Netcamp projects competition
Expertise:
Besides Artificial Intelligence, Heuristic Optimization and Algorithms, Alex has been vividly passionate by Web2.0, blogging(and problogging), Ruby on Rails and entrepreneurship.
Although Alex is currently working full-time for a really cool US startup: TRexGlobal - Fixing real problems of real estate investors, as well as using his spare time for blogging and personal projects, you might have a chance to reach him:
If what you need from him doesn’t take much of his time(and if the wage is worth the effort), he might be available to give you a hand, a research report or expert opinion in Internet, Web 2.0 startups, blogging or Ruby on Rails projects.
Contact him using the form over at Contact
orice altceva! Este gratis! :)
