Hey, my name is Puiu Calin.
Welcome to my playground
This is a space where I keep track of things that catch my attention. I don’t claim to be an expert on any of these topics; I’m just someone who enjoys the process of figuring things out and keeping a record of it.
Most of what you see here are notes and articles about my current interests. I started this site because I wanted a place to store ideas for my future self, but I realized that keeping them in a private folder didn’t make much sense. If I’m already putting in the work to understand something, I might as well leave the door open for anyone else who’s curious about the same things.
It’s a mix of what I’m learning today and what I’m planning to build tomorrow. No strict schedules or polished corporate talk, just honest explorations and whatever I find interesting enough to write down.
Feel free to look around. Maybe you’ll find something that sparks your curiosity too.
My path so far
It seems my heart has settled on Django. Driven by the need to launch a project quickly at my company I discovered how powerful and fast this framework can be. This led me to dive deeper into how a Django project should be structured and how to properly configure a server to run it. Now I am focused on learning how to develop and optimize applications to make them as efficient as possible.
During these years I focused on building a home lab to experiment with server configurations. I worked on setting up environments to run various PHP scripts and managing everything through remote access. This was a hands on way to understand what happens at the server level and how to maintain a stable infrastructure for my projects.
My curiosity led me to Kotlin because I wanted to see if I could build a functional mobile app. I managed to create a small application connected to my Osclass site through an API allowing me to activate or deactivate ads from my phone. It might not have been the most polished code but it worked perfectly for what I needed. This project was a great way to prove I could bridge the gap between web and mobile to solve a real problem.
This was a period of intense experimentation with PHP, MySQL on Osclass. I spent my time trying out different ideas, seeing what sticks and what breaks. Along the way, I introduced JavaScript into my projects, but I found myself leaning heavily toward jQuery because it felt more intuitive for me.
I didn’t set out to become a world class expert and my focus was simply on learning by doing. I experimented with various setups and made plenty of mistakes along the way. That process allowed me to accumulate a solid set of practical skills and a real understanding of how web applications come together. It was less about theory and more about the grit of figuring things out.
This is where it all started. I was driven by a simple curiosity about how websites actually work and what happens behind the scenes. I began exploring the building blocks of the web, trying to understand how a few lines of code turn into a functional page.