Welcome to Maksym Shalenyi’s Blog!

• Nov 09, 2026 - TDD in age of LLM

  For over two decades, TDD has been one of the most powerful tools in software development. Its focus on breaking down the complexity of a codebase into abstractions with clear responsibilities, mapped to the domain, provides a way to express business rules through code. This has made it one of the leading practices in software development. However, in recent years, the advent of LLMs has been a game changer. Their ability to produce large amounts of code in a very short time, often more than can be thoroughly reviewed and validated, has pushed TDD and traditional approaches to software development into new and largely uncharted territory.

• Apr 18, 2026 - Viy: Simple End-to-End Process Monitoring for Linux

  Viy is a simple process monitoring tool for Linux that gives you a full historical view of your process’s resource usage — not just the final peak, but a complete timeline across the entire run. Named after Вій, a creature from Ukrainian folklore known for its powerful gaze that sees through everything, this tool helps you see through your program’s resource usage over its lifetime.

• Jan 14, 2025 - EasyDiagram: Next Steps

  Here I define a multistage strategy for improving the EasyDiagrams’s performance and functionality while maintaining an optimal performance-to-cost balance and allowing for organic growth. Establishing a refactoring framework/guideline with clearly defined steps is crucial for the project’s long-term success. So let’s dive in!

• Jan 08, 2025 - EasyDiagrams: Designing MVP

  I want to share the process I followed to design the MVP for EasyDiagrams.work, along with the outcome. Each chapter in this document represents a step in my research and design process. The main goal of creating this document before writing any code was to anticipate potential challenges—even those that initially seemed trivial—and to capture the goals, as well as the key decisions about design and architecture.

• Sep 27, 2024 - Gilded Rose Refactoring Kata

  Not too long ago I tried “Gilded Rose Refactoring Kata”. It is an excellent exercise, and I highly recommend to try it. I’ve also seen many people sharing great solutions on GitHub and in personal blogs. However, almost all of the solutions I’ve seen did not reflect the reasoning about “why?” and “how?”. Why the current code needs to be refactored? How do I want to change code? How do I want to go about changing code? Why I refactored the code in this way and not another? So this post is my reflections on the “why?” and “how?” which I hope you will find useful and/or entertaining.

  The kata and its test is kindly provided by Emily Bache and can be found on emilybache/GildedRose-Refactoring-Kata. I highly encourage to give it a go, as I had a lot of fun working on it. The kata goes like this: