Hi, I'm Florin — a developer based in Bucharest.

• 🥬 LinkedIn
• 🖼️ Florin Popa Personal Portfolio
• 📄 CV
• You can probably rabbit-hole into my curated list of GitHub Stars

• self-taught, started in kindergarten, coding for 30+ years
• failed startup during highschool with two others for a car classified ads platform
• started working professionally since the 2nd year of college. first month salary was 100$
• worked in a web agency where I had to do everything except design and sales
• moved to startup accelerator where I led the team that delivered a project leading to a company funded
• got the opportunity to be paid to learn Ruby and work at one of the best companies in Boston, but company got acquired by PE and I was forced to find something better
• spent a year at Smily syncing data into Airbnb
• spent another year in a Nigerian fintech building savings features
• freelancing ever since

• EduChk - lightweight academic domain checker for edge workers
• ingredient-parser-hybrid - hybrid ingredient parser using CRF with LLM fallback and embedding-based normalization
• recipe-scraper - ethical web scraper for allrecipes.com recipes
• dotfiles - had to be done 🤷

• termoficare-data - tracking heating status in Bucharest
• aeron-miller-index - financial index based on the local Aeron market

• Follow the Sun Calculator - plan 24/7 shift coverage across timezones for distributed team
• Time Value Calculator - calculates how much to spend to save time

• Advent of Code - Advent of Code solutions in Ruby
• Gossip Glomers in Go - distributed systems challenges using Maelstrom
• Claude Code in Go - a Claude Code clone built in Go using CodeCrafters
• Redis in Ruby - build your own Redis in Ruby using CodeCrafters
• HTTP Server in Go - build your own HTTP server in Go using CodeCrafters