Software Engineer

Codrin Pavel

As co-founder and CTO of Pavels, Codrin makes the technical decisions and writes a large part of the code himself. He starts from the product: who will use the system, what it has to do for them and what will break first under real traffic. Only then does he pick the tools.

Architecture before code. He doesn’t open the editor until the plan is done. He maps:

the data model
how the services talk to each other
where the caching sits
what happens when traffic spikes or an integration goes down

Changing a diagram costs minutes, changing a live system costs weeks, so he would rather argue with a whiteboard than with production. When a library or plugin doesn’t fit the plan, he builds his own.

Performance and security are, by his own admission, a mild obsession. He has been known to delay a release over 20 extra kilobytes and to run PageSpeed one more time “just to be sure”, for the fifth time. Every script and dependency has to earn its place. Pages render on the server, caching runs from the database to the edge, and Core Web Vitals are measured on a mid-range phone, not a fast laptop.

He treats security with the same suspicion. Every input is untrusted, every external system is guilty until proven innocent, and no secret ever reaches client code. Concretely:

requests between systems are signed
public endpoints are rate-limited
each service gets only the permissions it needs
dependencies are audited before they are trusted

It’s not paranoia if it keeps the site fast and the data safe.

Code that others can build on. He writes for the next person who opens the file: clear structure, consistent conventions and no shortcuts that someone will have to undo later. He fixes problems with rules, not patches: one solution that covers the general case without breaking the exceptions. The standards he sets are the ones the rest of the team works by. That is also why the projects other developers turn down tend to land on his desk.

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