7 courses at Politehnica University of Timișoara, spanning secure systems, language and platform work, and the engineering practice around both. For students heading into schools rather than industry, it also covers how the subject itself is taught.
Threat analysis and cryptography first, then authentication and access control, then security at the network, application, database and cloud layers, closing on incident response. Taught from a course book I wrote for it. Lab topics run from written studies (Zero Trust, DevSecOps, post-quantum cryptography, ISO 27001 and the NIST framework) to implementations: AES and RSA in C#, and a REST API secured with OAuth and JWT.
C# from types and control flow through object-oriented design, then LINQ in both query and method form. The second half switches to F# and functional programming, and the course ends where the two languages meet: error handling, testing, and making C# and F# interoperate inside one solution.
The professional toolchain rather than a language: virtual machines and WSL, Git and the discipline of a readable history, Docker images and Dockerfiles, and CI/CD pipelines that build containers automatically. Assessed by an individual project in any language, delivered as a public Docker image and graded partly on whether the commit history shows real incremental work rather than one upload the night before.
Agile practice from the Manifesto onward: Scrum and Kanban, the Product Owner, Scrum Master and development team roles, sprint planning, backlog management and retrospectives. Velocity and burndown provide the measurement layer, and SAFe and LeSS cover what happens when a project outgrows one team. Each student writes and defends a short state-of-the-art paper on one facet of it.
NoSQL through MongoDB: document modelling against relational habits, references versus embedding, aggregation pipelines, indexing and query optimisation, then the administration half, covering installation, users and access control, backup and restore, replica sets, sharding and time-series collections. Labs run in Docker and finish with a database mini-project.
Rust and Go for systems work, taught in English. Ownership, borrowing and lifetimes; traits, generics and pattern matching; Option and Result over exceptions; concurrency the compiler can vouch for; and unsafe blocks with FFI for when the guarantees have to be set aside deliberately. Assessed by a semester-long project with an architecture document, checkpoints and a closing code review, under a written AI policy: generation is allowed, but a student who cannot explain a line of their own code has not submitted it.
Taught in the university’s teacher-training programme (DPPD), for students qualifying to teach computing in schools. Lesson design and pedagogical scenarios, active-participative methods, learning styles, and the productive use of student error and cognitive conflict. The assessment half is the sharp end: operational objectives mapped onto Bloom’s taxonomy, specification tables, and test items that genuinely measure the level they claim to.
I supervise diploma and dissertation projects in secure systems engineering, domain-specific languages, and embedded audio-video systems, areas drawn directly from the funded work on theresearch pages.