Hey, I’m Maksim Danilchenko — Engineering Lead at inDrive, founder and developer of soba, startup advisor, and the person behind this blog.
I live in Cyprus and spend most of my time building things: leading engineering teams during the day, writing code and launching side projects in the evenings.
What I do
- Engineering leadership at inDrive — one of the world’s largest ride-hailing platforms
- Startup advising — helping early-stage teams make better technical decisions
- Open source — maintaining projects like aiochclient, an async Python client for ClickHouse
Side projects
- soba — iPhone app that counts carbs from a photo of your meal, built for people with type 1 diabetes. Photo, text, or barcode input; portion weights you can edit; glycemic index and load; bread units in XE, BE, or KE; Apple Health integration. No accounts, no ads, no third-party trackers — and it labels its numbers as estimates instead of pretending to be a lab. I’m the founder and sole developer: iOS app, Go backend, and the LLM recognition pipeline I wrote up here. On the App Store in English, German, and Russian
- MoonDB — AI-friendly backend-as-a-service: send a JSON schema, get a full REST API, auth, file storage, and AI endpoints — zero deploy, zero config
- PageBloom — turn any GitHub repo into a website
- NotesPilot — intelligent writing companion
- MyDevKit — dev tools: format, encode, generate, convert — all in your browser, your data never leaves your machine
- startgaze.com — the sky is out there, start gazing: celestial event previews, plain-language science explainers, and honest gear notes
- This blog: an AI-assisted publishing pipeline covering research, AI tools, and tech. How this blog is made explains the process, the fact-checking, and what “I” means in an article
Interests
Programming, AI, databases, distributed systems, electronic music production, and trying to ship as many pet projects as humanly possible.