About

MetronForge is an independent research notebook by Viktor Mikhalkin.

One question runs through the work collected here: what can be reconstructed about a system from incomplete observations—a program from a finite set of test runs, an object from its projections, or a sequence of events from the traces it left behind?

Before moving into software testing in 2006, Viktor Mikhalkin taught university mathematics for nine years. Since then, he has built test frameworks from scratch for banking, healthcare, retail, and SaaS systems, most recently focusing on property-based and model-based testing aligned with domain-driven design. His background also includes postgraduate study in computational mathematics, and he is ISTQB-certified.

His current work connects software reliability and verification with numerical analysis, scientific computing, inverse problems, and tomographic reconstruction.

Both strands express a single interest. A test suite is a finite sample of an infinite behavior space; a tomographic dataset is a finite collection of projections. Both ask what can legitimately be inferred about a system from partial evidence.

How the notes work

Many notes here engage with work by other authors. When they do, they name and link to the source and quote only what the argument requires. The purpose is to direct readers to the original work, not to replace it.

Commentary addresses claims and arguments, not their authors. When a note disagrees with a claim, it explains what evidence would change the conclusion. When it extends someone else’s idea, it says so explicitly.

Corrections are welcome. If you wrote something discussed here and believe that a note misrepresents it, please write to me. I will amend the note with a dated correction rather than alter it silently.

Papers and identifiers

Full texts of available papers and preprints are deposited in HAL, the French open archive. This site provides summaries and supporting reasoning rather than duplicating the full texts.

ORCID: 0009-0000-4954-2300

IdHAL: viktor-mikhalkin

Source repositories and public artifacts are collected under MetronForge on GitHub.

Where to start

Notes are the main body of work. The Projects section contains implementations. The Publications section contains formal outputs and links to their full texts in HAL.

The views expressed here are my own. For questions about the work, reach me at viktor@metronforge.dev. For professional matters, connect with me on LinkedIn.