I need to spit it out.

I want my friends to hear what I’ve seen and what I’ve learned. To feel it in their stomach. I want the world to know this story.

For me it’s not about hype or likes, it’s about the simple truth that everyone can make a difference. Because I hope that my story will inspire others and ignite them to action.

And yes, I know that by supporting Ukraine and writing this I can have problems in Russia and I won’t be able to visit my family anymore.

24th of February, 2022

Like many Ukrainians on this day, I woke up to this crazy news — war has been started. I was shocked. What? How? WHY!?!?!

In the upcoming days, I was glued to the TV. Trying to be in touch with all my friends from Ukraine. And also — from Russia. I was stuck between two worlds. Friends suffering in Ukraine on one side, and shocked relatives in Russia not knowing how to deal with all of this on the other. And I’m in the middle, tearing myself apart.

Not able to work, not able to think about anything but people that are close to me struggling to survive right now. The news showed thousands of refugees trying to escape the war and save their lives.

The last drop was a message on 28th Feb. from my cousin, a Russian Jew who was living in Ukraine. He wrote to me that he and his family had successfully driven away from Kyiv to a village, but now were sitting in the basement without electricity. He wrote that the whole village was surrounded by Russian forces and they were being shelled all the time. He sent me a map of where he was and where the Russian forces were. And then, his phone was disconnected. For days… I called and called and there was no answer…

I have to do something about it!

I drove everyone crazy in my company, saying over and over again that we have to do something. And I felt there should be something that I could personally do. Eventually, our COO, Ouriel, said: Just fly there and figure out what you can do and how you are going to help.

Luckily for me, my employer has an entire team dedicated to crisis management. Anton, from this team, was the first to fly there, and I was about to join him the next day. At the time, I was changing groups, moving from Mobile to API. I spoke to Vlad, my future manager who is also Ukrainian with many relatives and friends in the region, trying to convince him to come with me — and he agreed! We packed suitcases full of macs, chargers, keyboards, screens, bought plane tickets from Tel Aviv to Warsaw and took off right on the next day. Therefore, on my first day in Vlad’s group, we both happened to be on our way to the Ukrainian border.

All three of us didn’t know exactly what we were going to do. We agreed that in the worst case scenario, we would just rent a car and drive people from the Ukrainian border to the nearest big city.

At first, we arrived in Korczowa, in a huge refugee camp. What we saw there was chaos: a large hangar, few volunteers with megaphones at the center of it, shouting something. Thousands of people arriving every minute on buses from the border. Mainly women and children with a few suitcases. Their entire lives… Just in one suitcase. They had no clue where to go next, what to do next or where to stay. Even at the camp, there were not enough beds for everyone to sleep in…
Those first minutes terrified me, I felt numb. How come all this could be happening!?

Korczowa camp from inside:

In a few minutes, we pulled ourselves together and went outside to start shaping a plan of how we could help. At the entrance, we noticed some folks with small hand-made signs offering free rides to cities and to other European countries. Some of them even offered a place to stay and work. We spoke to them and found out that they were just regular people, not belonging to any organization. They wanted to help and came to pick a family or two and drive them to a safe place or host them for some time. They were from all parts of Europe.

It looked like we could help here by organizing the driver-refugee matching process. We grabbed our macs, bought one big TV and just went into this small island of volunteers in the middle. We explained to them what we wanted to do and … just started doing it. We put a big QR code leading to a form which asked drivers to register with a name, destination and a scan of their driver’s license. When they finished filling the form, we asked them to wait at a certain area. All this information went to a board and we displayed this board on a big TV screen that every refugee could see immediately upon their arrival at the camp. Vlad and I started matching drivers with refugees.

While working on the system, I went outside to smoke. Standing in the cold (it was around -10°C) I noticed a woman with a few months old baby in her hands. She was sitting on the freezing ground. Crying silently. Desperation gripped her. It felt like something broke inside me. I rushed to her, helped her get inside the camp, got some warm tea for her and found her a bed with a blanket. This really hit me hard — I became so furious and so determined to build the best solution out there and help refugees like her.

In the beginning, we were doing everything by ourselves, but when the process had begun to work and a few matches had happened, we trained some volunteers that were around. With a spark of excitement that our system seemed to be working, we decided to let the volunteers manage the system and went to visit another refugee camp that was close by — Przemyśl.

My friend, Oleh Zasadny,was volunteering there, so we decided to give it a shot and see how we can collaborate.

The situation at the camp was the same: mess, chaos, a lot of refugees, few volunteers running back and forth. All logistics at the camp were managed by using paper and megaphone.

But.. There was a gleam of light: Oleh said that the organizer from the event-management company would be arriving tomorrow, so it was worth it to come back again and meet him.

So we returned to Korczowa — and what we saw there was discouraging. Volunteers that we had trained left the camp, and new ones weren’t using the system. All our macs were closed and the TV was shut down… Bummer. Frustration. Chaos again. Then it struck me that in all the noise and density of the crowd, almost no one was crying. I was amazed. Despite all the shit that was happening, they kept going, fighting their own battle of survival. Quietly, bravely.

Getting back to our matching system, we knew that the next challenge was to make the system work without us being involved. And for this we surely needed a local partner. The next day, we met the organizer of the Przemyśl camp and explained what we did in Korczowa.

Even though the organizer didn’t believe much in the success of our initiative, she gave us one of the local volunteers and a permission to work at the camp. Everyone was very skeptical and even suspicious like “what do they want from us?” But Vlad and I were determined to make it work. We organized the same flow with volunteer drivers and built a separate room for driver registration together with other volunteers.

Then we trained local volunteers how to use the system. We saw immediately how they started to spread the knowledge and explain the process to each other. The barriers built by skepticism were broken as soon as they saw what they were capable of with our tech. We had this special feeling that it might work.

Next, we organized the same process for refugees registration and management. Volunteers filled out our form for refugees: who they are, where they want to go, do they need a place to stay and calm down, how many children they have with them. We didn’t have enough laptops and we saw that this process created a huge queue. So we bought and started using tablets and smartphones, and then volunteers were able to work not only on laptops, but also on those handset devices in the queue itself

The system started to work. It was amazing to see how, slowly but surely, chaos turned into some order.

During implementation, we faced some issues in the system: missing functionality, errors on EU server. And this was a moment where I really felt the magic of wonderful people at my organization. Vlad and I wrote on our slack channel and immediately, all RnD were working on solving it. It was amazing to see how many people jumped right ahead and were ready to help.

For the first time, at the field, we were building a flow to manage refugee camps and we were real users of the system. We normally develop our systems from a warm office with snacks in the fridge. And only after a single day of using it, Vlad and I were talking and sharing tons of improvements and suggestions that both of us had. I remember it was such an amazing feeling!

Late at night, when sitting together with organizers of the camp, for the first time, we were able to see how many refugees passed through the camp in one day:

what the requested destinations were:

how many volunteer drivers we had:

and how many volunteers per language we had in general

As one of the organizers said, it was mind-blowing and insightful. For the first time, he realized that they were missing rides to Warsaw. And he rushed out of the organizers’ meeting immediately to find more volunteer drivers to Warsaw.

The system worked.

And we faced more and more challenges. One of the biggest ones was “human traffic”.

It turned out that there were some volunteer drivers that were using this situation for their own profit… So, we decided to battle it. We set up a meeting with a few devs and product managers and the next night they already came up with a solution — to add to the form the driver’s license validation using the 3rd party API in monday.com.

At the same time, our Mobile team — within one night — built an app to match refugees & volunteer drivers using QR code scanning.

And all this turned out to be just the beginning of a huge effort.
While Vlad, Anton, and I were at the Ukraine/Poland border, every day we posted our progress on our slack: reports, pictures, videos. This created so much visibility and alignment on what was going on, that many folks were willing to join and help. As a result, every week new folks from my company flew to different camps to replicate the flow that we had built and to create many new solutions: medicine inventory, bed management system, supply, and more.

We all can help

You can call me romantic, optimistic, but I believe in the good part of humanity. During this journey I met so many wonderful and inspiring people. They told me crazy stories of what had happened to them — the stories you wouldn’t believe could happen in a civilized world in the 21st century — and despite all this, they found the courage and strength to help others.

For example, we found people in Ukraine who agreed to drive to the village from where my cousin connected me last time — they found him and his family in the basement, gave them food and books, and later, after the bombing stopped, they drove him out of that place.

Also there was a young woman, a refugee, who had just arrived at the camp, and a few hours later, she approached us and asked how she could help. And she is just a regular person, like me and many of my friends. And if she can help, we all can help, too. Especially us — developers, we have that super power: with a few lines of code we can make a difference for so many!

So, I beg you, don’t distance yourself, don’t close your eyes and pretend that the problem doesn’t exist.
You can help in so many ways.

You can do more.

We can do more.

We have to do more.

How?
There are many option. As developer you can start here and build a tech that can change a life of many:https://www.techtotherescue.org/

Thank you so much for taking the time to read this. If you enjoyed it, I would be incredibly grateful if you could share it with others. I truly want this message to reach as many people as possible. ❤️