Welcome — and a bit about me — Ciprian Gheorghite

Hi, I'm Ciprian Gheorghite. If you've landed here, you've probably seen one of the things I've built — or you're just curious who's behind the site. Either way, welcome. Let me introduce myself properly.

The day job

For the last thirteen years I've worked as a backend developer, almost entirely on Salesforce Commerce Cloud. If that means nothing to you: it's the platform behind a lot of the online stores you've bought from without ever knowing its name. My corner of it is the part customers never see — the SFRA and SiteGenesis architecture, custom cartridge development, and the SOAP and REST integrations that quietly move orders, inventory, and pricing between systems while everyone else is looking at the pretty product page.

It's unglamorous, load-bearing work, and after all this time I still genuinely enjoy it. There's a particular satisfaction in the invisible stuff working exactly as it should — an integration that just runs, a checkout flow that never drops an order, a piece of logic that holds up under a Black Friday load it was never obviously designed for. Thirteen years in, I've developed strong opinions about what makes backend code survive contact with the real world, and not all of them are the ones I started with.

Lately I've been deliberately broadening out — from commerce specifically into the wider Salesforce platform — and working toward the Platform Developer I certification. A fair amount of what I pick up along the way, the parts that actually clicked versus the parts the documentation glosses over, will end up written down here.

The after-hours half

The other half of me just likes to build things, and doesn't always need a good reason. Some of what I make is useful, some of it is purely "could I actually pull this off?", and the best projects usually start as the second and quietly turn into the first. A few recent ones:

Idleforge — an idle-skilling RPG you play from Discord, the web, and your phone. Twenty-eight skills, gathering and crafting chains, combat, an economy, and a leaderboard to climb. It began as a small experiment and turned into a genuine game with real players, which is roughly the most fun and most humbling thing that can happen to a side project.
The Ascent — a guided trainer I built for the PD1 certification I mentioned above. I've never learned a subject as well as when I'm building the tool that teaches it, so instead of just studying, I built the thing I wished existed and studied from that.
...plus a rotating cast of smaller experiments — Discord bots, self-hosted tools, the odd game prototype — that mostly exist because I got curious on a weekend and couldn't leave it alone.

None of this is my job. That's exactly why I like it: no ticket, no deadline, no one to convince — just an idea and the question of whether I can make it real.

What this blog is for

I've noticed that writing something down forces me to actually understand it, rather than just getting it to work and moving on. The gaps in my own thinking only become obvious when I try to explain them to someone else. So this blog is partly selfish: it's where I make myself finish the thought.

For you, that should mean two kinds of posts. From the day job: backend and commerce lessons, integration war stories, the occasional strong opinion about how this stuff should be done — and notes from the certification journey while it's fresh maybe. From the after-hours half: the messier, more honest story of building side projects nobody asked for — what worked, what I got embarrassingly wrong, and what I'd do differently next time.

No fixed schedule and no grand plan for it yet. I'd rather publish something worth reading occasionally than something forgettable on a timer. If any of the above sounds like your kind of thing, stick around.

More soon. Thanks for reading.