Some developers close the laptop at 6 PM and think about something else entirely. Liviu isn’t one of them. The same instincts that make him good at solving problems at work – curiosity, discipline, the desire to explore new paths – show up just as clearly in the way he runs the server he manages at home and the small Arduino projects he builds to prank his friends. Talk to him for five minutes and it becomes obvious: this isn’t a developer with hobbies. It’s one mindset, applied everywhere.
Where the rabbit hole started
Liviu’s path into tech didn’t begin with a computer science class. It began with remote-controlled airplanes and a YouTube clip.
As a kid, he was already into RC planes, and a fan of Mythbusters and Adam Savage. Thirteen years ago, the show released a clip showing that a plane like his could be flown straight from a computer.
“That turned my attention to Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, and there I enter the rabbit hole of computers in general.”
That rabbit hole never really had a bottom. It just kept branching – into a coding career, and later into a home server, microcontrollers, and a habit of building things nobody asked him to build.
From “coding is everything” to problem-solving
Ask Liviu what he enjoys most about being a developer today, and the answer says as much about how he’s changed as it does about the job itself. Early on, he saw code as the center of everything in IT.
“Looking back at this statement, I’m happy that I’ve transitioned to a more problem-solving mindset.”
That shift became real early in his career, when he learned that every project and every problem calls for courage, a willingness to explore, and the drive to find the right solution.
“You’ve got to find the courage to speak up, drive the conversation, debug the problem live, and settle on a workaround until the fix is delivered. Each conversation arises different perspectives. If we implement this, which customers are impacted? How will the deployment change? Will it make the client’s day easier in the first place?”
School teaches the hard skills – languages, hardware, pipelines. Moments like that are what taught him the rest.
The gym, the run, and the same discipline
Running, then the gym, then running again – sport isn’t a side habit for Liviu, it’s a fixture. He’s plain about why.
“Sitting in a chair is not healthy at all. Go for a walk in the afternoon, go to the gym, do some yoga at home, you name it, but you have to move. We’d like to move properly when we retire after all those years, don’t we?”
The connection to his work isn’t a stretch, either. The discipline that gets him through a training block is the same discipline that gets a project through the months, or years, it actually takes to ship.
“Discipline is key. It not only helps you in your personal life, but in the professional as well. Such long-term challenges usually span months, or even years, and it’s your responsibility to tackle them.”
Building his own corner of the internet
At home, Liviu runs his own server, self-hosting everything from photo backups to an ad blocker to a VPN. It would be easier to just subscribe to the ready-made version of each of those services. He does it the harder way on purpose.
“Privacy and control. We share so much data to companies that use it on the brink of legality, and I despise that most software does this.”
Running his own infrastructure has also changed how he sees the people whose job is exactly that.
“Infrastructure teams don’t get the recognition that they deserve. So many dials and switches to twist and turn – it’s a pretty difficult job, especially when that fix is needed ASAP.”
Arduinos, MeshCore, and doing it his way
Liviu’s smaller projects – microcontrollers, Arduino builds, tinkering with things like MeshCore – come from the same place a journal does for him.
“It feels authentic, I’m expressing myself in ways that are different from software. I get the same expressiveness from Arduinos, doing silly little projects to prank my friends and colleagues, and I love it.”
None of it needs to follow best practices, or fit a predefined mold. That’s the point.
“What I create does not fit into a predefined mold of projects, does not follow the best practices of software development or hardware design, but it fits my definition of a creation. In the era of AI-written websites, AI-generated videos, music, lyrics, you deserve to disconnect from all the noise and enjoy doing it your way.”
What actually connects it all
Running, self-hosting, soldering odd little gadgets – on paper, they don’t have much in common. Liviu sees one thread running through all of them: enjoying the world he’s in, on his own terms. He keeps a quote in his head for exactly this.
“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
Put a bit of yourself into whatever you do, at work, at play, in life – that’s less a slogan for Liviu than a description of how he actually operates, at a keyboard or away from one.
What’s next
Liviu’s current curiosity is pointed at something less technical than a server rack: soft skills. It’s a subject he’s circled back to for a long time, and one he thinks pays off well beyond any single project.
“You can achieve great milestones if you’re true to yourself.”
It’s a fitting place for the curiosity to land next – the same honesty that shows up in his running routine, his home server, and his pranks with an Arduino, now aimed at the part of the job that has nothing to do with code at all.
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