I hate how funerals are always at 9 a.m. I’m not really a mourning person

In simple terms…

♥️ I am a simple human being, a lover of life, nature, sea, sunsets, dancing, running, fitness, great books, music, deep conversations, personal growth, health, happiness, philosophy, animals, technology, and some humans.

🤬 Hater of deception, manipulation, politics and complacency. Also, not fond of mango ice-cream, kombucha, ginger, cilantro, cold weather and needles.

📍 Based in Lisbon 🇵🇹, see what I am doing right now. If you’re visiting, see my Lisbon recommendations.

A bit of background

Started my journey on Earth on a snowing November day, in a city called Timișoara. Timișoara is a city in western Romania (Eastern Europe).

Had my first computer in second grade (thank you, parents!), and have been bashing at the keyboard ever since.

I’ve gotten pretty good at logic, algorithms, software development, web development, APIs, scalability, distributed systems, high-availability, finding the right solution for any given 101010101 challenge.

That made my left brain happy and thriving.

Then got a taste at managing a small development team, getting a Scrum Master certification, meeting deadlines, sorting out budgets, product mapping, handling external clients, eliminating obstacles and motivating the team to thrive.

Somewhere along the road I picked up portrait photography as means to make my right brain happy as well.

I’m into artistic nude photography, going hiking, swimming and truly appreciating beautiful sunsets.

Follow me on Instagram to get an idea of what makes me smile, or see my portrait photo collection.

I currently intend to keep it this way, putting my 22 years of web development experience into my daily work to craft amazing pieces of software, and to keep doing photography for the love of it.

Last but not least, I’m excited to meet new and interesting people, to build meaningful relationships and to continue my personal growth journey.

About this website

This is my personal website, something that I didn’t have for nearly 20 years. A series of events happened during 2020 that led to this digital corner of the internet being born.

It started in the Spring of 2020 when a very dear friend and former colleague of mine did a solid research into note taking and shared it with me.

That’s how I found out about the Zettelkasten note-taking system, about Obsidian, Roam and an overall increasing interest in how we take notes.

We all use either Evernote, Notion, a notebook, our phone’s Notes app or some other way to remember things, but very few manage to do it in an harmonious and sustainable way.

So I started using a new system to take notes, one that’s not relying on any specific company, service or product to use and maintain. And one that would allow me, at some point, to publish my notes, for everyone’s benefit.

The second piece of the puzzle was The Social Dilemma documentary which I recommend watching and even though it focuses on the psychologic manipulation of the population to get addicted to infinite scrolling applications, it triggered another epiphany in me: Every time we post something on any platform, we’re actually building content for that platform.

Each time we post on Instagram, we grant Instagram a royalty free licence to use that photo. Their terms and conditions state, among others, that:

When you share, post, or upload content that is covered by intellectual property rights (like photos or videos) on or in connection with our Service, you hereby grant to us a non-exclusive, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to host, use, distribute, modify, run, copy, publicly perform or display, translate, and create derivative works of your content (consistent with your privacy and application settings).

These two sparked the desire to have my place online, where the content I create has a home that’s not building some company’s value proposition. A place that will be here in 10 or 20 years when Evernote, Facebook or Instagram might not even be around.

Welcome to my personal website!

There’s no cookie banner as I have no interest in stalking people. No pixel tracking, funnels, clickbait, exit popups or anything else. Stay as long as you like, come anytime, leave whenever.

The URLs are (hopefully) evergreen, so you can link to any page knowing that it will still be here for the upcoming future.

On a more technical note, I’ve been struggling at finding the right solution to build a long-lasting website, which involved switching platforms from time to time and (mostly manually) migrating all the content.

Yes, manually!

The short history is:

• 2022 - Jekyll & Vercel Netlify, started from the Minima theme, added Webpack and ad-hoc styling.
• 2021 - Powered by Ghost, hosted on Digital Ocean. Very nice to manage, write, edit, not so nice to maintain the server and keep up with the Ghost updates.
• 2020 - Hugo and TailwindCSS, based on the hugo-theme-tailwindcss-starter theme by Dirk Olbrich. Hosted via GitHub Pages.

Changelog

2024:

• May 29 - Updated the homepage to be more like a “link-in-bio” approach.
• May 23 - Changed to sans-serif Inter font.

2023:

• Feb 15 - Over-simplified the website by listing all the posts on the homepage, linking the about page from the homepage, therefore making the menu/navigation useless. So removed the main navigation as well. See blog post about this
• Feb 14 - Removed the Photography and Exploring sections, as they are now on their own photo.daniliuc.com website.

2022:

• May 7 - Big update including navigation, cover photos, headings, spacing, mobile version.
• May 2 - Switched production hosting to Netlify. Vercel doesn’t correctly support libvips, and deploy takes too long.
• May 1 - Launched Jekyll website, hosted on Vercel.