Hello world! That’s how every program starts, and how this blog was meant to start. Instead of WordPress’s stock greeting, here’s a short intro to me.
Who am I
I’m Pavlo Kotula, just another web developer making the internet a little more chaotic. I hold a master’s degree in Computer Engineering from Lviv Polytechnic and have perfected the art of turning cryptic client requests into websites that actually work. Along the way came freelancing, an SEO company (where I sometimes felt like a monkey who knows how to use a computer) and teaching front-end at Beetroot Academy. Somewhere in there I also did UX in Axure (turns out it’s still alive), managed projects and sold bitrix (God forgive me), all at the same time. Then I grew the Webolatory studio together with a colleague, and sometimes worked with clients abroad: the US, Canada, Germany and the Netherlands. Now I’m all that’s left of a once very ambitious studio, but it’s still alive.
What I do now
13+ years of building WordPress and WooCommerce sites:
- websites and online stores, from simple business-card sites to complex logic;
- plugins and integrations: Nova Poshta, Ukrposhta, monobank, PrivatBank, WayForPay, Stripe, KeyCRM, Poster, Odoo and any other API, with or without documentation;
- servers and security: Hetzner, Nginx, Cloudflare, backups, git deployment;
- support for existing sites;
- MCP: connecting sites to Claude and Cursor so content can be added through chat. How I got there is in the article about building a WordPress site with AI.
I use AI agents every day, but responsibility for the result stays with me.
Just for fun
Besides client projects, I have my own. Tysiacha (“Thousand”) is a three-player card game in the browser: really three living people play it, and its changelog already has 147 releases. I also 3D print: to order, I printed a swimmer boy and two swimmer girls, 2.6 meters in size. It took 45 kg of plastic. Those who know, know how much patience that takes. Sometimes I pick up a soldering iron.
At home I don’t skip experiments either. I built my home network myself, draw Grafana dashboards for the network and backup power, and tinker with a smart home. Once Grafana on my MikroTik showed that a cheap smart-TV box had sent 50 GB of data to China in 12 hours. I spent a week monitoring it and picking apart its guts to stop that. I didn’t throw it away: that saved me 700 UAH. Better not to count the time it took. I also like DIY renovation, Fusion 360 and three.js games. My smart home still has more monitoring than switches.
Beyond the screen
When I’m not glued to my monitors, I juggle life between my wife and two kids and learn to be a developer in Ukraine, a country attacked and still being attacked by russia, a terrorist state. But I’m still here, working non-stop and refusing to be ordinary.
If you have a weird task everyone else avoids, write to me: I like those.