Day 94

Thinking about the war in Ukraine reminded me of the longest I'd ever been away from Damian.  It was in November of 2019 when I spent 3 weeks in Kyiv, Ukraine. I went there for work. 

During the summer of 2019, the executive leadership of my company, ETI Software Solutions, made the decision to do a hard pivot in terms of our product strategy. Since the company's inception (1992), ETI has always sold products that were created (read: coded) in-house by our software engineers. While we might embed within our application some 3rd party software, we did this only in places where most software application companies do the same: operating systems (OS) and databases (DB). There are plenty of each available that are either good or very good at what they do. Given the highly specialized nature of operating systems and databases, it's almost always worth it to simply license and use an existing solution rather than code your own. These two exceptions notwithstanding, the rest of the applications ETI has created and sold have been 100% proprietary (read: we wrote all the computer code). 

The decision reached in the summer of 2019 turned this approach of 100% proprietary software on its head. Rather than write all the code ourselves for the replacement to one of our existing products, we would instead use a 3rd party application as the foundation and layer on top of it the pieces we felt were missing or needed to appeal to potential customers in our market - telecommunications and broadband companies that sell data, voice and video services to consumers and other companies. In so doing, only the portion that we added would be proprietary to ETI. The foundation application would still belong to whichever company was responsible for building it in the first place. The advantages to this approach are numerous but one of the biggest is that we only have to maintain the pieces that we create; the existing code would be handled by the other company.  The more feature rich and robust the foundation product the less we have to write and maintain ourselves. This speaks to three of the other key benefits - reduced time to market, and lower build and ongoing maintenance costs. 

We chose Microsoft's Dynamics 365 as our foundation platform. Unless you live in a cave and have no access to the internet or a computer, you have heard of Microsoft. This the same Microsoft that gave the world Excel, Word, PowerPoint, Outlook, Windows, Internet Explorer and X-Box - all consumer facing applications. Dynamics 365 (D365) is a world leading application suite that covers many different areas including Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Sales & Marketing, Call Center and Help Desk, and Field Service Management to name but a few. Microsoft has invested obscene amounts of money - think billions - and time into this platform; numbers that ETI could never reach given our small team of engineers - fewer than 20 - and product / engineering budget. While maybe not as well known to consumers as other Microsoft products, D365 is very well known in world of commercial IT. It has several amazing features and benefits, but the one that really made our decision easy is that Microsoft not only supports companies like ETI that want to customize D365 and resell it, they encourage it. This is the model they envisioned when they started building it nearly 20 years ago. 

So why Kyiv and why go through all this background? I'm getting to that. 

ETI is not a Microsoft development shop in that we don't have people on staff who have technical subject matter expertise in all-things D365. That said, we knew that we would need to hire people to help us build the product. But we were also very cost-conscious having a very limited budget. This meant that we could not afford to hire US-based resources. Well, we could have hired 1 or 2 but that would have consumed the entire budget. Since we needed more than two people, we instead looked at the entire planet to see where we could find experts that we could afford. And that's were Ukraine comes into the story. Turns out that there is a lot of affordable D365 development talent in Kyiv and other cities around Ukraine.  Fast forward to November 2019.

I flew to Kyiv in early November and met up there with my colleague, Rhyan. (Rhyan lives in Idaho.) Through the miracle of the Internet we had already hired three guys a few weeks before we arrived in Ukraine: Illya, Oleksii, and Vsevolod. It was our job to bring them up to speed on what we were doing, why we were doing it and what the new product needed to be able to do. I distinctly remember going to the MobilUnity office (downtown Kyiv) on that first day to meet with the team.  

Rhyan outside the MobilUnity office in Kyiv.

The view out of the window from our office space at MobileUnity

Rhyan leading the class

Rhyan and Illya at lunch

Oleksii

Vsevlod

One of the many monuments in Kyiv

FYI...In case it's not obvious, I'm the one who took these pictures. 

While I was in Kyiv, Dawn and Damian went back to Iowa to spend Thanksgiving with her parents. Damian has always had a great relationship with Dawn's mom and dad. Especially Dawn's dad. They would do all kinds of stuff together whenever they got the chance. They really enjoyed going fishing. With me being gone to Ukraine, Dawn and Damian were happy to drive to Iowa and celebrate the holiday with her family. 

Damian with his grandmother, Dorothy

Damian playing in the snow at grandma and grandpa's house

This was the only major holiday of Damian's life that I didn't spend with him (and Dawn). I would have only given that up for something that I thought was truly important. Going to Kyiv and working with the team felt important to me then. And it feels even more important to me now. I met some really wonderful people while I was in Ukraine and have been in regular contact with many of them since my trip as they continue to build and shape our new product. Had it not been for the pandemic, I know I would have gone back, probably several times. The point of all of this is that for me, news about the Russian invasion of Ukraine is not something abstract. This is not some far away place that I may or may not have heard of, that I know next to nothing about. I've been to Ukraine, to Kyiv. I've met the people and worked side by side with them. And now I worry for their safety. Bombs and bullets are indiscriminate. It doesn't matter who you are, who you work for - if they hit you or detonate close enough to you, you are dead. It's that simple. 

This is as real as it gets. And it's scary as hell. The pain and anguish of losing Damian is still foremost in my thoughts where it is likely to stay for the rest of my life. I don't need any more tragedy in my life, but the longer this war continues, the more likely it is. All I can do in the mean time is hope that our guys and gals and their families are reasonably safe.