About — Idan Goldman

Self-taught code hobbyist, evolved into a savant, UUH a cookie! ADHDer by day, digital pathfinder by night. Where is the milk? Turn on the light!
— Idan Goldman

Digital Pathfinder, guiding through code mazes

Well, I’m me, what do you mean? No really… Heyyy, I’m Idan Goldman.

Hacker since birth, curious about tech and how it ticks. Hand me a codebase and watch as my inner archaeologist lights up enthusiastically unraveling layers of code to demystify its secrets.

These days my general bio can be summed up as → “ADHDer, keyboard typer, father and Abu-Bu”. Living in Israel and learning to become the best version of myself one day at a time.

Origin Story

My tech origin story begins as a hobby turned into a career, back in the days of fighting IE6 demons while gluing images into sprites with Photoshop. Had a lot of fun playing LEGO with plain HTML, CSS, JS, before layers of complexity became the norm we call frontend development today.

To be fair, template engines, design systems, and JavaScript frameworks helped A LOT of developers shift with ease to writing code closer to users. For me it meant time to move on and explore lower layers of complexity.

The Journey so Far

2008-2012: Started the classic design-to-code email and website pages grind at Reconcept, then IQTech. Moved to YIT working on large-scale content websites like Xnet and Ynet while running my freelance business IdanSmith. Learned the hard way that clients always want changes five minutes before deadline.

2012-2014: Joined Netvertise as Frontend Developer, climbed to R&D Team Leader managing 8 people. Led complete codebase rebuild of a SaaS product and managed the handoff to an abroad team. Discovered that good communication beats perfect code and being kind while managing people comes along way.

2014-2016: Experienced that start-up life at OpenWeb as a Frontend Engineer collaborating on creation of a design system and coding embedded iframe social components. Promoted to WordPress Lead Developer managing 4 websites and distributed freelance teams. First real taste of leadership across time zones.

2017-2019: Joined CommPeak as Senior Full Stack Developer, then Lead Frontend Developer. Built company-wide UI Kit libraries and rebuilt legacy Rails from jQuery spaghetti into modern architecture. Also taught Frontend Week at Le Wagon once and left with a taste doing that again later on.

2019: Founded StaticPage, a SaaS coming soon page builder where you could download actual source code. Great learning experience about the entire product lifecycle. The adventure ended with a classic entrepreneur mistake → built it right for the wrong market.

2019-2024: Co-founded 123Code Studio with a business partner, our “car garage for tech companies”. Built and managed distributed teams serving B2B clients, championed clean code and BDD methodologies. Eventually parted ways to pursue separate professional directions each in their own lane.

What I Actually Do

Here’s the thing, I don’t just turn technical chaos into systems that work. I turn people into better developers while we are fixing the chaos together and planning for better future.

Whether that’s teams shipping buggy code every Friday, senior devs who can’t onboard juniors, helping teams stop writing spaghetti code, or figuring out why the CI/CD pipeline breaks every Tuesday. I’m always asking: “How do we make sure everyone learns from this?” While fixing and documenting the findings.

My approach is pretty simple

Figure out the real problem, not just what people think it is and patch it.
Explain stuff in plain English, no technical jargon without context.
Build things that won’t break next time.
Document everything so the team doesn’t hate working on it later.
Teach as we go because the best fix is one the team can maintain.

I have been doing this for 15+ years now, and honestly? I still get excited when I see someone have that “aha!” moment when the code finally clicks. That’s the real work, not just the code but the people who write it.

Building teams that don’t suck is probably what I’m best at. Distributed teams across time zones, junior developers who need structure, senior developers who need autonomy, and that magical sweet spot where everyone grows together.

The “Car Garage” Philosophy

At 123Code, we used to say we were like a car garage for tech companies. I still love the analogy:

Bring me broken codebase → I will diagnose what’s actually wrong.
Show the options → with honest pros and cons.
Fix it properly → not just patch it with duct tape.
Teach the team → so they can maintain it.

Spoiler alert: Most “urgent” rewrites aren’t actually urgent. Most legacy systems just need some TLC and better processes. But sometimes there is a real need to rebuild the engine and that’s okay too.

Beyond The Code

When I’m not wrestling with distributed systems or explaining why a database is slow:

Gaming → Once in a while I have a break to play on GeForce Now for an hour or two. Brings me back to my CS, PlayStation and Xbox days.

Learning → Always curious about new tech, but picky about what’s worth adopting. Current obsession: making JavaScript feel more like Ruby and creation of a unified programming language for maintaining multi-language codebases by writing pseudo-code once and transpiling to target languages. Check out my studio page if you want to see what I’m currently tinkering with.

Writing → Sharing thoughts on my notebook page whenever I have something worthwhile to share.

Dad stuff → Being a father is the best and hardest job …and I won’t lie, it helps me better manage people with unrealistic expectations.

Real talk: As someone with ADHD, staying focused in our fast-paced digital world is tough. Some days are productivity goldmines, others are scattered mess. But I stay optimistic because, honestly, what’s the alternative? Plus, hyperfocus can be a superpower when pointed in the right direction.

What’s next? Check out my notebook where I ramble about whatever’s on my mind, peek at my studio to see what I’m currently tinkering with, or see what I can help you with if you think we do work well together. I promise to be nice and not bite.

P.S. — If you made it this far, you might actually enjoy working with me. Or you are procrastinating. Either way, thanks for reading!