Igor Shtanko
Founder & CEO, dForge
Founder and CEO of dForge. Twenty years of building software for businesses worldwide.
Igor Shtanko co-founded SweetSoft, a software company that has delivered solutions to businesses around the world for over twenty years. Across all that work, one pattern kept repeating: companies never actually want software, they want their operations to run better. The software is just the means.
He kept running into the same two failure modes. Growing companies outgrow their off-the-shelf SaaS and start bending the business to fit the tool. Others commission custom systems that work fine until the one developer who understands them moves on, and the whole thing turns into a liability nobody dares to touch.
dForge is his answer to both. It is a metadata-driven platform for building the internal tools a business genuinely needs: modular, maintainable, and not hostage to a single person's memory. The aim is the same one that has driven his entire career: let the software serve the business, not the other way around.
Essays by Igor
Dashboards That Follow You, Not the Org
Most dashboards force a choice: one rigid view for everyone, or a personal BI tool that quietly bypasses your permissions. dForge dashboards are per-user — ship a default, fork it the moment you edit, and pin tiles from anywhere into a home view where every tile still runs under its folder's security.
Generated vs Hand-Built: The Hidden Cost of UI Builders
UI builders like Retool, Budibase, and Tooljet let you draw screens by hand. dForge generates them from a model. Here's why that architectural difference decides how consistent, secure, and maintainable your app is two years from now.
Reports Without a Developer — and Without a Data Leak
In most systems, a new report means a ticket and a wait, or a BI tool bolted on with a service account that quietly bypasses your permissions. dForge lets users build the reports and dashboards they actually need — and a report can never show data the user couldn't already see.
Beyond No-Code: Why Business Logic Should Live Separately
Exploring why separating business logic from technical infrastructure is the key to scalable, maintainable enterprise applications
The Hidden Costs of Departmental Silos in Enterprise Software
How isolated departmental systems drain resources, create inefficiencies, and hold back business growth
Declarative Programming for Business Applications: A New Paradigm
How declarative approaches revolutionize enterprise software development by focusing on what instead of how
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