Hi. My name is Marius Ursache and I was born in Timișoara, Romania.

I’ve graduated Politehnica University Timișoara, Electronics and Telecommunications Faculty with a diploma in Applied Electronics. During the last years at my University I’ve learned to administer Linux servers as a System Administrator. My guide and my colleague was an older fellow, named Călin Szonyi, from which I learned to think before I type and read again before I press enter.

During the last year at University, I’ve learned basics of PHP and MySQL too. I’ve had the opportunity to apply it as an intern at Alcatel Timișoara where I’ve built a PHP/MySQL version of an Access/ASP internal tool. Working there I’ve learned the advantages and disadvantages of working for corporate companies. You have access to tools, hardware, network setups that you won’t find in small companies (IBM P Series running AIX, Sun Sparc Enterprise running Solaris, Network Appliances SANs). You “learn things”, like the basics of vim, my editor of choice in the last 10 years. Also, you “learn things” about office politics.

After the Alcatel internship and after I’ve finished my studies, I’ve took 2 months off to try to settle in a different city. Things turned out to be harder then I’ve thought and I had to go back to square one (Timișoara).

A couple of months later, I’ve started to work in a wonderful small company that made firewall appliances. This company was the opposite of my previous experience, no office politics, no ‘enterprise level’ hardware/tools, but open source and cheap hardware. Although the medium was different, I had great colleagues from which I learned to always polish my ‘skillz’.

Together with a couple of colleagues from Spidernet, I decided that it’s time to move on and pick another challenge. This time was an ‘Internet/New Media’ company that gathers product data from data vendors, offers from merchants and offers price comparison, all this in a friendly, community based (synergetic and other buzzwords). At this company I’ve learned that it’s not simple to just import on feed of 700M of data and it takes some time to establish processes and build a team of ‘guys behind the curtain’ to integrate it into a bigger system. I’ve done ‘release management’ (take some files, send them live, hope it works, rollback if it doesn’t), built tools to administer products, members or advertisements. Some things I’ve done alone, some in a team but if I’d have to pick, I would always like to work within a team, to debate and share ideas, to learn as much is possible from others.

Beside PHP, I’ve learned a bit about python and Django Framework. To do something practical with Django, I’ve made a simple site/blog. The most ‘advanced’ part from it was reading data from Nike+ running site (which is pretty easy to do using basic python libraries).

When weather and time permits I skate or run (jogging), and during the autumn/winter I exercise at the gym.