Florin Ciocîrlan
Software engineer. I write about Angular, NestJS, microservices, and the practice of building software that holds up.
Start here
Practical notes from real product engineering: frontend architecture, platform abstractions, developer experience, and systems that reduce delivery cost.
Writing
8 posts-
I Built My First RAG and Skipped the Vector Database on Purpose
A technical teardown of a multi-agent, text-to-SQL RAG built on LangGraph for a large ERP. Plain-English questions in, a correctly-shaped AG Grid out. Why I skipped embeddings and a vector store, how the agent team verifies its own SQL, and the row-level governance problem I did not solve.
Jun 2, 2026 -
The LEGACY-7: a 7-step audit before you say yes to an AngularJS migration
The exact checklist I run before agreeing to lead a legacy-Angular migration. If your team can't answer all 7, the migration will die at month 4 the same way the last two did.
May 28, 2026 -
How I Replaced 40 Hours of Weekly Excel Work With an Event-Driven Commission Service
Killing a single-person Excel pipeline with a NestJS event-driven microservice, formula-as-code, PDF report generation, and a dead-letter queue for resilience.
May 27, 2026 -
The migration plan that saved my job
Two AngularJS-to-Angular migrations had failed before I got there. The third worked. Here is the phase plan, per-screen checklist, and feature-freeze mechanics — exactly as we ran it for 5,000+ users.
May 27, 2026 -
How I Saved the Company Thousands Every Day With These Changes
Four concrete Angular optimizations that slashed build size by 43%, cut CI/CD costs, and improved time to first byte for 5,000+ users.
May 25, 2026 -
How We Used AI Workspaces to Deliver Faster Without Breaking the Platform
A simple story about solving a real business problem with Claude Code CLI, cmux, Git worktrees, symlinks, and Playwright automation.
May 22, 2026 -
The wrapper that saved the company tens of thousands every month
How I turned repeated AG Grid implementations into one typed Angular wrapper that cut delivery time, reduced QA churn, and made a complex dashboard platform easier to scale.
May 21, 2026 -
One Screen, Twenty Flows: Taming Variation with the Strategy Pattern
How a single Angular component serves twenty subtly different workflows without growing a single if-else branch — and why a busy restaurant POS works the same way.
May 20, 2026