maksym bondarenko

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| About me | Explorations | Random |
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Profile image of Maksym with city skyline

we taught magic sand to do linear algebra and now it can think (maybe)

"went from ai agnostic to ai religious" - people after talking to me

Hi! I am Maksym, currently a Computer Engineering student at Columbia University, coming from Kyiv, Ukraine. I'm graduating in May 2026 and am a John Jay Scholar at Columbia.

I am passionate about AI, hardware, startups and deep tech.

Previously, I have started Pravopysnyk, AI grammar correction service for Ukrainian, published research, and worked on cool hardware projects.

Currently exploring LLM memory and AI tools for hardware engineering, and thinking about ways to productize general robotics.

Explorations

Ideas, experiments, and deep dives into things that fascinate me

PaperTrail
making you feel good about papers you read this week.
Telegram Wrapped
flask app that fetches data from your Telegram account; semantic search coming soon.
Trot or Rot
full-stack quadruped project, from Fusion360 CAD and PyBullet sim to RL locomotion on real hardware.
Cache Me Out
RISC-V out-of-order processor with custom microarchitecture and FPGA implementation.
EraseDraw
learning to insert objects into images by first erasing them; CVPR 2024 paper with a fun visual demo.
FPGA MP3 Player
Xilinx FPGA board wired up as a tiny Verilog-based music player.
Ukrainian GEC
synthetic-data-heavy grammar correction system for Ukrainian that set a new state of the art.
Flutter
natural-language-driven drone planning that won a 10k hackathon run by Sebastian Thrun.
Giraffe.study
hackathon project for auto-generated long-form educational videos.

Random

For writing, check out my Substack. For everything else—random ideas, experiments, and side quests—you'll probably find traces scattered across my projects and posts.

Random facts

Competed at the International Linguistics Olympiad.

Certified bartender — favorite drink: Negroni.

Ran the San Francisco Marathon.

Used to do ballroom dancing.

Big fan of strategy games (Civilization, Paradox, Chess).

I like building robots that look slightly cursed.

Contact

LinkedIn GitHub Email 
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