Welcome! This blog contains my thoughts on culture, technology, science, education and learning.
I am a computer scientist, who then became a mathematician, who is currently a physics PhD student, from Romania with a passion for writing open source software and sharing his knowledge with the world. I hope the articles I write will be useful to you.
All opinions are my own.
Posts
-
The Lie product formula
The Lie product formula (also known as the Lie-Trotter or the Trotter-Kato or the Suzuki-Trotter formula) is a well-known result from Lie group theory1 which can be used to simplify computations involving exponentials of matrices or linear operators.
The formula states that
\[e^{X \, + \, Y} = \lim_{k \, \to \, \infty} \left(e^{X / k} \, e^{Y / k}\right)^k\]This blog post povides a brief introduction and some motivation for studying the Lie product formula, then gives a detailed proof of the result2.
-
Or rather functional analysis. ↩
-
One which I find personally to be the simplest to understand, requiring the least amount of mathematical prerequisites; it is based on this Mathematics Stack Exchange answer from the anonymous
user159517, whom I thank for writing up a fairly clear overview of the steps involved. ↩
-
-
How to share SSH credentials between Windows and a WSL 2 distro
The Windows Subsystem for Linux is a convenient solution for people who want to use Linux development tools on Windows machines. However, since it’s implemented as an operating system running within a lightweight virtual machine within another operating system, it’s sometimes inconvenient to synchronize your tools and settings between Windows and Linux.
This article describes an elegant solution for keeping in sync your SSH keys and configuration files. It goes through and details some of the answers presented on the corresponding question on the Super User Stack Exchange, before presenting the one I’ve come up with.
-
On leadership
Leadership is a word thrown around a lot these days, but what is it actually about? Why is it such a desirable skill? I try to review the current understanding of this term and provide some practical advice on how anyone can become a leader.
-
Adding symbol stripping to Cargo
My pull request adding a new Cargo option to strip symbols from binaries was recently merged. I wanted to share the story of how this contribution came to be, as well as provide some tips for prospective contributors.
-
Think before you code
I used to be the biggest opponent of designing your app ahead-of-time. I was a firm believer the only right way to build great software was to get on the keyboard and just start writing it. As Linus Torvalds put it, “Talk is cheap. Show me the code”.1
-
The advantages of being calm
The modern world provides us with the information we need at our fingertips, and we are more connected than ever. But our busy schedules, constant notifications and the fear of missing out brought along stress. This eats us from inside, and the worst part is we realize how affected we are by it when it’s too late, after having already lost a lot of time.
I wrote this post to reflect on how stress was affecting me and how I learned to be more carefree and enjoy life. I hope that others will draw upon my experiences and learn not to worry so much.
-
How to become an open source developer
Do you want to be an open source software developer? To send pull requests and solve issues or review code on GitHub? Are you looking to add some practical experience to your CV while writing code for the benefit of all? Then I can help you get started. And the best part about open source development is the community you become a part of.
This article describes how to choose the projects you contribute to, how to start contributing and how to become an active developer.
-
How to learn Japanese online
日本語はすごい！This blog post describes the freely-available resources I consider to be the most helpful when learning Japanese. Each site comes with a description, detailing how long should you stick with it and when it’s the time to move to the next one.
-
The value of humility
A few months ago, I went to a tech evening about building scalable products. The welcome speech was delivered by Daniel Dines, CEO and founder of UiPath.
Daniel presented a short bit of his life story: how he started as a programmer in Romania, the path to becoming a programmer for Microsoft, and how he came up with the idea for his startup. While I will not bore you with the details of his talk (you can find a full recording here), there is one key idea which sticked with me: how important it is to be humble.
-
Organize your life
Feel like you’re falling behind your daily schedule? Do you wish you had more hours in a day? Each of us gets (more or less) the same amount of time to live; it’s within our power to organize our priorities and spend as much time as possible doing what matters.
subscribe via RSS