Support Gluu Developer Oleh Bozhok, Cedarling Co-Author

Kyiv native Oleg Bozhok (Божок Олег Вячеславович)--pronounced "ba-shok"--joined the Gluu team on August 15 last year. As his employer, he's reported to me directly. One of my most important priorities as CEO of Gluu is to lead new product initiatives, so I've worked closely with Oleg since he joined the team. Although I'm based in the USA, our workforce is globally distributed--we need to find the most talented programmers wherever they live. Oleg was tasked to lead a "ground-up rewrite" of the Cedarling, an open source security tool--which he successfully completed. He is a brilliant Rust/Go programmer who instantly established his credability and oustanding work ethic at Gluu. Since joining the team, he has 75 commits to our open source project--that's an average of one commit every three days. Given the quality of those commits, it's an impressive pace. In addition to programming, he reviews code from other team members, comments on issues and helps to organize pull requests. This Github activity chart shows a nice picture of his activity:

After leading the delivery of the Cedarling MVP last month, Oleg took a much needed two weeks of vacation to re-charge. He and his wife Darina stayed in Kyiv. They used the time to setup an indoor garden.

On Thursday April 24, at approximately 1:05 a.m., a ballistic missile struck the building where Oleg and Darina lived. As reported by the BBC , the worst-hit area was the western Svyatoshynskyi district.

I have been in contact with Darina's employer who was located in Kyiv. Here is her report:

An air raid alert had been announced, but since it was reported that ballistic missiles had been launched, it was already too late and dangerous to run to a shelter. They moved to the corridor inside their apartment instead. Darina lay on a mattress, while Oleg stepped about one meter away to his phone, which was charging, and bent over it. At that very moment, the missile hit their building.

A ventilation pipe immediately fell on him, which allowed some air to reach him and created a small space between his knees and his head. According to him, this also played a positive role, as it provided him with extra breathing space. He immediately called out to Darina, but she did not respond.

Emergency services arrived at the scene very quickly and started rescue operations (this was reported live in the news). At the site of their apartment, there were just ruins left - not even walls remained.

Colleagues tried calling Darina during the night, but there was no signal. They started contacting the police, but they had no information at that point.

In the morning, I called hospitals, but no patients with their names had been admitted. Later, there was news that a man under the age of 30 had been pulled from the rubble after more than seven hours.

I called the ambulance service, and they confirmed that Oleg had just been taken to the hospital, but there was still no information about Darina.

We went to the hospital and found him there with his mother, who was in a state of shock but was extremely grateful that her son had miraculously survived.

Oleg’s mother was not in the apartment at the time of the strike; she lives separately.

Oleg had many bruises, and his body showed various discolorations, but he was conscious and able to talk. He said that Darina had died and described where they had been at the moment of the impact.

The local news has written two stories to commemorate Darina:

It will take Oleg time to recover physically from this attack. His injuries are serious. The protein from the crushed muscle can clog up the kidney microtubules and cause kidney failure. The whole Gluu team is of course praying for his recovery.

This is a lot for a 29 year old to process. When he recovers physically and spiritually, the funds will be a foundation for him to start a new life. 100% of the proceeds will go to Oleg to help him recover. While a few dollars won't fix any of this, it's something we can do to support someone in our community who was powerlessly subjected to a state-sponsored act of violence.