 Hi everyone. Hello. Thanks for coming today. Okay, let's start. Maybe somebody else will come. My name is Irina. I came to you here today from Ukraine, and I believe most of you heard what have been happening in Ukraine since February 24, 2022. And my session today will be about wartime remote work, and the superpower that we as Ukrainians learned while being under unique circumstances. A few words about myself before we start. I am Ukrainian. I came here to you from the city called Mikolayev. It's in the south of Ukraine, not far from the front line, unfortunately. I've been in IT for nine years already. Seven years I've been managing projects, and seven out of these, three out of these seven years I've been working with Drupal projects. And I'm a happy mother of 11 years old son. This is not the last slide of my presentation, but here I would like to say thank you for everyone who came to my session today, just because, frankly speaking, when I got an email that my session got approved, I was a little bit shocked because I thought that this topic might be relevant only to Ukraine. However, I realized that I need to be grateful for this chance to come here, to stay in front of you, and share my story with the community, story of Ukrainian people, because the war is not yet over, again, unfortunately, and this is a good chance to let you know what's happening, and hopefully you'll find it interesting and will hear some important things. And I'd like to start from the quote that the President of Ukraine gave. He said that we Ukrainians are a peaceful nation, but if we remain silent today, we will be gone tomorrow. So I'm really, really grateful for this chance to be here in Peaceburg and, you know, sharing my experience with all of you. Thank you. And before we start, I just want to say that the photos that you will see here on my presentation, they are not intended to shock you or make you feel upset. However, you may find them chilling, and honestly, when I was preparing for this session, I have given this talk many times, but it's still difficult for me to share, and you may find it difficult to hear sometimes. Let's start the agenda for today. So before we can dive deep into the details, I'd like to immerse you a bit into the atmosphere of my morning of February 24 and the first week of work time. Next, we'll dive deep into the company's challenges, support, and lessons learned during work time. Next, I'll share a few stories about our developers from the Drupal community who became volunteers and defenders. Next, I'll talk a bit about the work time remote work practicalities and how they are different from the COVID time remote work. And finally, I'll share some information about the pillars that help Ukrainian teams to support our mental health. So let's go. Imagine the day before, evening of February 23, 2022, you finish your working day. You said, thank you for one more productive day to your colleagues. You had a dinner with your loved ones, and wish good night to your kids. And then, morning of February 24 came. For me, this morning started at 5.20 a.m. I woke up to the sound of actually, what was that? I sent a message, a telegram message to my best friend at 5.30 a.m. in the morning, saying to her that, listen, I woke up to the sound of explosions. At 5.40, I sent a message to my mom because my son was staying at my parents' house that night. I said to her that we probably won't be taking my son to the school this morning. And by the way, my son visited his school of line last time on February 23, 2022. At 5.50, I opened my working slack, 5.50 a.m., in Ukraine, early morning. And I realized that all my colleagues were already actively discussing ways of evacuation from the city. Worse saying, we have never ever discussed anything at 5.50 a.m. on our working slack. But this time, everybody was there online. Everybody was discussing what to do because to be honest, when you, we felt that something was going to happen, but we couldn't believe that it really would happen. At 6.00 a.m., my partner and I, we started packing our bags. We tried searching for cash and we were trying to get out of the city because my son and my parents, we were staying outside of the city a bit, one kilometer far from the center of the city. In the next four slides, you will see real photos. All of them were provided to me by my colleagues. You will not see pictures there that you might have seen in the news. All of them are real. In the first slide, you see these are emergency suitcases. These are the things that people started packing in the morning of February 24, like me, or some people were trying to get ready for these in advance. So you see there are some suitcases and bags with loved pets. Next slide, this is how the traffic jam looked like in the morning of February 24. Remember, it was early morning. For me, it started at 5.20, but for some people, it started at 4.30, depending on the explosions across the country. And on the left side, you see the photo of the queue. And on the right, this is how our road looked like because most of the people, they were evacuating to the west of Ukraine. But those who were able to go abroad, they were trying, mostly women, because they were trying to save their children and they were moving abroad to another country, mostly Poland. Next slide, these are real photos that my QA engineer shared with me when I asked her to provide some wartime photos that she might find relevant. And this is how her car looks like when they were trying to evacuate with her family. You know, you see this is a bullet hole in a car during evacuation. And the last is wartime damage. Right picture is a hotel slash business center located in my native city. And this is how it currently looks like. And it located in the center of the city. All right, if we try to summarize, you know, some of the actions they were taking during the first week of war, and I was trying to summarize all of them, and we're saying that when the war started, I've been working in another company in FFW agency. And the first thing that I did in the morning when staying in the traffic jam, I sent a message to a global team slack message saying that this morning Russia invaded Ukraine. And if you have any Ukrainian team members working with you on the projects, they, they probably will not be working today. But they do need your support. Next, of course, we informed clients. We released statements that have been shared with all our customers explaining what happened in the morning and trying to predict at least nearest next steps, you know, to ensure that the projects are running as smoothly as it was possible that time. We created a Slack chat that was dedicated to Ukrainian team members support. Everybody was welcome to join this chat because there we were sharing all the news, all the facts, based on the reality that we faced in the morning of February 24. And everybody was able to support or just share some kind words. So that was a space where we can discuss anything related to war and the circumstances that we faced that time. The team members started relocating to safer places. As I mentioned, most of them were located to the west of Ukraine, but some of them were located to another countries. And finally, we got over the shock because, you know, nobody expected this to happen in Europe, actually. And we started creating some business continuity plan to ensure that we can keep our operations running. Next, I'd like us to talk about the company's challenges, support and lessons learned during this wartime period. And before we dive deep into the details, I want to share some numbers with you. So there was a report prepared by IT Ukraine Association based on the results of 2022. And the report says that the war has proved to be a real challenge for the IT industry, as all companies have faced problems. And these were all unique problems. However, according to survey, 34% of companies have successfully adapted to the new realities. And more than 43% of IT companies even expected business grows in 2023 based on the results of 2022. And again, we're seeing that nine out of 10 IT companies, they managed to maintain more than 80% of their business process in 2022. In the next slides, I'll cover some actions or things that companies did in order to support us, their employees and support their business for sure. First, companies stayed in touch with the team. You remember I said that we knew we felt that something was going to happen, but we couldn't expect it would happen. However, we had to do some prep for this. And before we started, the most of team members were introduced because the goal was to ensure that we have all contact details up to date. We knew details, contact details of all the team members and their families as well. We had to know how they would be evacuated and what they will be doing in case of emergency. Maybe they have their own car and they don't need help or maybe they don't have a car and they need help from the team members when they decide to evacuate. And we created, as I said before, a communication channel where we could share all the updates, everything around the situation that was happening in February. You know, by doing all of this, I can summarize and say that we knew plans of each other and we were able to support one another because support meant a lot that time. Next, relocation supports. All the companies, I think all the companies because these were all that I knew, they helped with relocation to safer places and they covered the necessary expenses. And here I have some numbers again from that report that I shared before. As a result of the full-scale invasion, 70% of 80 companies conducted an unplanned relocation. 16% of companies conducted a full or partial relocation abroad. 81% of 80 companies in Ukraine that relocated abroad, they still plan to return their business to Ukraine when the war is over. All these items, all these things related to relocation support, they were aimed to ensure that the team members have safe environment and they can continue doing their job and they can continue to be productive. Psychological support. In the company that I'm currently working for, 5JARs, we have informal online team meetings set up, such of them like open mics, happy hour, short 15-minute water cooler talks. All these meetings, they are aimed to get the team together. We can discuss everything in these sessions. We can conduct English lessons that were hosted by one of our team members. We can discuss any tech news, share our pains, challenges, everything. So this kind of a free space where we can just use this one hour to discuss everything that we want. One-on-one meetings with HR, so I'm sure all of you know these two like one-on-one meetings where HR meets with the team members and they can discuss everything, check in, you know, ask how the person is doing, maybe he or she needs help. So this is kind of personal time for developer or everybody who works in IT with the HR manager just to ensure that the people are okay. Some of the companies, they organized meetings with psychologists, they invited specialists who organized sessions to the team members and these sessions were aimed to explain what we as Ukrainians might expect from our head, from our body, as a reaction to the war. Because, you know, when the war started everybody was in shock and we were expecting this to be over in two, three weeks. But when it came to eight months of the war, one year of the war, it is hard, you know, to understand how, what you are actually feeling because you already didn't use, you are still expecting something good to happen and I'm sure it will happen. But your feelings are changing, your body reaction are changing and specialists were trying to explain people what they need to expect from their reactions. And of course 24-7 chat room with the team members and you see photo here on the slide. This is a real photo from one of our open mics at five jars. We had an English lesson conducted by one of my colleagues and for one of the developers electricity got turned off and what he did, he didn't drop off the call. You see he put a candle, moved to mobile and continued listening to the open mic and then he shared this picture in our chat. I decided that it would be a really good fit for this slide. You know, by doing all of this, we are trying to get people feeling that you are not alone. We all go through this challenge and together we can overcome any, any, any difficulties. Next financial support. Companies allocated additional budget to support team members during war time. This additional budget can be streamlined to any purposes. Volunteering, relocation, one-time payment to buy all necessary equipment that you need to continue doing your job. Emergency time off was introduced. This was a special task where team members could log their time for an emergency break without a need to request vacation and use their paid time off. And additional vacation for those team members who requested it and also paid off for all days when the team was not feeling ready to work or were able to work part-time. Companies, by doing all these actions, they try to stabilize the business process and of course take care of their team members. Some numbers, maybe as a support to the previous slide, this is an impact of blackouts. Maybe some of you know that in October 2022, Russia has been carrying out massive missile attacks on energy infrastructure in Ukraine and this led to power outage across the whole country. And IT companies, they had to, you know, to take some measures to stabilize business process because we knew that winter was coming and we had to be ready for this period of time. And under measures, you actually can see the list of them on the graph, but I will just highlight some of them. These were acquisition of generators, using of star links, fuel procurement, purchasing of power banks, transferring data to the cloud, payment for co-working and even adapting offices to the team so they can live there when there were some outage. Next, flexible and careful project management. So I am a project manager and this is something that I was doing and keep doing since 2022. We, SPMs, we knew about the situation with every single member in our team because we had to, you know, to understand what we can expect, where this person is located, whether he or she might appear online or might not. Our daily stand-ups, they got updated. So you know that usually when we start daily meetings with the team, we ask them what you were doing yesterday, do you have any blockers, what are your plans for today? But the first question that we ask our team now during daily stand-up, how are you? Are you staying safe? Do you have electricity? How was your night? Did you sleep? Because, you know, if some of you followed the news, I might say that people in Kiev, my team members, they are not almost sleeping during May just because of their constant missile attacks on the capital of Ukraine. We also, as a company, we maintained detailed technical documentation so that every connected developer will be able to dive into the project details if the dedicated developer cannot appear online. In our practice, we use Basecamp for project management. So we try to, you know, to store all the comments, all the updates there so that everybody can pick up it from where we landed and continue, you know, doing the job and follow the project. We, SPMs, we were ready for process flexibility. We created, I call it for myself, what if document? So what does it mean? So it, for example, what if developer A cannot be available today? What if IMZPM joins the meeting, but then I got electricity turned off and client remains on the call, but I'm not. What needs to happen in this case? We were planning in hours. So it was not planning in quarters, in days, in hours because you start your day from good morning and then you never know what will happen in a few hours. That's why we were trying to manage our project and the situation really in hours constantly, you know, checking on everyone to see if anything changed or maybe not. Transparent communication with the clients, it was a must. We were not trying to hide anything from our clients. The communication was transparent and we were updating them, you know, as much as we can on the situation. And in the next slide, I'll have a few quotes that our clients shared with us to support us. And we're saying that nobody left us. Everybody keeps working with us, even in 2022, in 2023, and they hope many, many, many, many, many more years. So if we, not, there is one more item, important one. So with PMs, we had to keep calm and not give into panic by ourselves. We were also there, you know, experiencing same challenges. However, we understand that we are team leaders and we have to support everybody in our team. Of course, we were scared, especially sitting in the shelters, you know, however, we had to say good morning every day, ask people how they are doing, try to find some appropriate words to support them. And I think we are doing this really great so far, since I'm staying here today. I would say that to summarize all of these, understanding the situation, understanding the risks, it helped us in managing expectations and staying on top of all uncontrollable circumstances. And as I promised, next slide will be with a few quotes that our five Jarian clients shared with us and keep sharing, because they are supporting us and supporting us and this support, it means a lot, believe me. Okay, last point here is about hiring. I must say that hiring didn't stop in 2022 and in 2023 as well. According to Jini analytics, Jini is one of the most popular job sites among Ukrainian developers, and they always provide some nice statistics. They are saying that in 2022, hires were down by 13%. And this happened for the first time in 10 years for Ukraine. However, despite all these challenges related to work, Ukrainian IT managed to adapt. And speaking about our company during 2022, our team has grown by 15% and in 2023 by 25%. And I hope we'll keep growing. And all these actions, you know, they were aimed to strengthen the team with the new team members. All right, let's finalize these slides by reviewing the lessons learned during 2023 and lessons that we keep learning in 2023. Challenge was accepted. It was a unique challenge, but it was accepted. We were ready to make decisions quickly as company. And at the same time, we had to adapt to changes quickly. We had to be ready to manage a lot of risks. And when I say a lot, I mean a lot, a lot, a lot of risks, you know. Under risks, I mean like team members' availability, relocation, electricity outage, and many, many, many other risks that keep happening in our country. And safety of our team was a top priority. And keep going and deliver high quality software development service continues to be our priority as well, despite the fact that war is still happening in Ukraine. All right, let's switch focus now to another topic and speak a bit about wartime remote work practicalities. And here I would like to say that COVID-19 prepared the industry for the remote work. And when I was thinking about the main practicalities that I would like to list here on the slide, I decided to put four of them here. Consistent communication with the team and clients, focus on productivity and efficiency, necessary technology and equipment, and work-life balance. And you may notice here on the slide that the last two items they are highlighting in red, just because they were a bit different for people in Ukraine during wartime remote work. Remember, I said you that I will be sharing real photos. So here you see on the slide necessary technology and equipment. And when we think about technology and equipment you need for your work, we probably, you know, imagine laptop, nice table, chair, some decoration around your working space. However, I especially, I learned about some new devices in 2022. And some of them I added here as a photos. So these were generators, power stations, star links. Next, work-life balance. For all of us in Ukraine, work-life balance has transformed into war, work-life balance. What does it mean? It means safety continues to be a top priority, flexibility and readiness to adapt to constantly changing circumstances. Travel and invocation opportunity for us, they were minimized. However, instead, we managed to focus on our professional growth, on our working tasks, and on our education. And when I was adding this item for the traveling, I decided that I need to calculate how much time it took me to get here to the Drupal Con, so it was about 37 hours from me from Ukraine to Pittsburgh. And life goes on. No matter what, life continues, and it, you know, it keeps happening. So this is kind of one of the important things under work-life balance item. Next, I'd like to share a few stories. I want to say that quite a lot of Drupal developers from our Ukrainian community, they joined Armed Forces of Ukraine in 2022. Unfortunately, I can't speak about all of them now because it will take a lot of time. However, I reached out to three of them and asked for the approval to share stories. So there will be three or four slides about our people who probably would like to be here in Pittsburgh, however, they are doing the most important job right now in Ukraine. First, Andriy Luhvishchik, he's my colleague. He actually front-end engineer at Five Jars, but at the same time, he's a volunteer at Assembly of Godchurch in Lutsk. Lutsk actually is a Drupal capital of Ukraine, we call it. Andriy delivers humanitarian aid and covers some military needs. By needs, I mean he provides our soldiers with the uniform, with sleeping bags, with some protein, and with some generators. And when I was asking Andriy to share maybe photos, maybe videos with me, he shared a video. I'll try to show it to you in the next slide because he and his team, they visit territories that were de-occupied. They deliver humanitarian aid to these people, support them, because you know, when you know, I hope you know and you wouldn't know it, but these people, they need help, they need some food or at least some, I don't know, some first needs, you know, after they've been in occupation. Okay, so let's try to enable the video. This is Andriy. This is actually her son area. If some of you heard about her son, it was under occupation for eight months. And when I asked Andriy what is his motivation, he said that many people get used to what's been happening in 2022. However, he is inspired by those who keep fighting. Despite the fact, these people have lack of water, lack of light, lack of heat, and even lack of roof over their heads. And even being after eight months of under occupation, you know, these people have the strength to keep going. So Andriy and his team, they visit such people and try to, you know, deliver them as much food, as much things, everything that they need. Next, Anatoly Polyakov, maybe some of you know him. He's a software architect at Tima Chicks. And Anatoly has been working with Drupal since 2006. He's been on Drupal org for 10 years already. He is an active Drupal contributor. And currently, he is defending our country as part of the armed forces of Ukraine. Anton Martinuk. Anton is a Drupal developer at OpenBet. He has been working with Drupal since 2015. On Drupal org, he's been for eight years already. He's also an active Drupal contributor. And he is defending our country as part of the armed forces of Ukraine. And this is the photo that he shared with me when I asked him. You know, I was, when I'm preparing these slides, I was trying to think what will be the best. I even wasn't sure how I can summarize all these stories because it's hard to summarize, you know. And I found another quote that our president shared. So I'd like to use it as a summary for these slides. He said that our victory in this war will be shared by everyone who was bringing it closer. So I would like to say glory to every Ukrainian hero. Finally, we're coming to the topic about pillars that help Ukrainian teams to support our mental health. And of course, I'll start from humor. Because during war, our people produced quite a lot of memes. All of them were created based on some events, some situations, some stories. So I think we'll have now a bunch of them available. So I try to add a few of them now so that you can see how they look like. The first meme is about us and armed forces of Ukraine. The next meme is about Ukrainian peaceful future of the free world. The next meme, actually, the hero of this meme is a grandma, because there was a story. I would say that Russia sometimes, not sometimes quite often, launches some drones. And there was a story that a grandma opened the window and just hit this drone by jar of pickles. And people created a meme related to this situation. Next. These are the stories related to Ukrainian farmers and Russian equipment that has been already destroyed. And these are the memes, you know, like Ukrainian tractor on the hunt, because people were trying to find this destroy technique and use it, I don't know for which purposes, or Ukrainian tractor, you know, towing Russian equipment. And actually, Ukrainian post office, our main one, they introduced a post stamp that you may see in the middle of the slide related to, again, Ukrainian farmers and Russian tanks. Okay, next. Next pillar was about constant communication. And here I would like to say that when the war started, our government, main one and local one, they were informing us about the current situation every hour at the beginning of war, and now every evening. So every evening I can open my telegram and I will find a message from our president where he actually delivers this information, not like a president, but like a friend. You know, when you sit with the friend in the evening and you're just listening how he spent his day. So this is the atmosphere of his messages. He usually tells us, you know, how was his day? What are his plans for the week? What are the challenges? What are the achievements? And when listening to this, you actually understand what's happening and you don't need to read news 24 seven because he delivers all these updates to us and we understand what to expect. Mutual support and unity of people inside the country, inside the companies, inside the teams, and see here in the slide you may see a few examples of how people were united on the first image. There is a, you know, when people were gathering together and we are wearing some camouflage nets for the military in the middle. This is the photo that our recruiter shared with me. She was sharing how they were providing meals for Ukrainian military and civilian and the third photo is, it's actually a cinema, but the cinema got transferred, you know, into our humanitarian aid office and people were trying to bring all the things there and there was a team of volunteers who were receiving and sorting this humanitarian aid. Hopefully it will become a cinema again soon. Also, when I wanted to speak about unity of people, I would like to highlight that maybe some of you know the branch company, they are active Drupal contributors and they organized Drupal global contribution weekend at the beginning of 2023. They supported this initiative and organized and hosted a seventh in a row event in the Drupal capital of Ukraine, Lutsk. That was a good time for people in Ukraine. You know that men in Ukraine, they are not allowed to go abroad, but you know, these guys, they organized an event. This was a good time of networking, fun and contribution and values have changed for Ukraine in 2022. Now people, family, health, intangible things become much more important over wealth and material assets. So I think that these images are self-explanatory, so I didn't add any descriptions to them. And to finalize my presentation today, I'd like to say that the most frequently asked question in Ukraine in 2022 was the question, how are you? And how are you in our country now means I am worried about you, I care for you, I love you. So before I finish my presentation, I just want everybody to think how are you after this topic today. Thank you. Thank you. Maybe you have some questions I'm ready to answer. Yep. I would say some of the schools they are now open, those schools which are in the west of Ukraine, because it's a bit calmer there. I'm staying in Mikolayev and as I mentioned at the beginning the school that school was closed on February 23. I would say thanks God and thanks to the remote work. My son is staying with me all the time and my parents helping me with him, but he's attending school online and you know at the time when I am working he's having his lessons. So we are trying to balance. It makes our work like work balance a bit complicated, you know, but we value this family time and this is something that we just can't do right now. So hopefully schools will be open, but I started feeling that I'm getting used to this remote work and he is getting used to this online. So hopefully you know when the borders will be opened, we'll be able to come abroad, visit some nice places and this you know online school will help us with this. So people are trying to find ways how they can continue working and taking care of their children. You know honestly thanks for the question. It was you know so many, so many things were happening during work time and these were some small decisions, some big ones, some big ones, you know, whether to you know to accept new people joining the team, let some people go, you know, talk to our clients, deliver the information to them. So I would say this was a complex of actions. There were not some big dramatic changes or decisions made, but it was a set of small decisions that we were making every day starting from morning. How we are operating today, what are the priorities for today? If we understand that people cannot be available, then we need to reprioritize the work inform the clients, you know, make the team available and this will happen like on going, on going, on going procedures. People are saying that they will take their families and go to the sea, finally. Yeah, but this is actually a complex of actions that are being discussed on the government level. So how we are going to support our mental health after the war, because we would like the people to keep to continue staying in Ukraine, you know, but we realize that people will need some break, will need some rest and I think we will need to allow people to go for some extended vacation, you know, because they will need some sabbatical or something, you know, to switch focus from the war time to normal life. So I think that having a rest will be the main thing that we will be focusing and as a company, we will need to think about certain actions, you know, to allow our team members to take this break because we need them. Yep. Mostly Europe. So I think the most of Ukrainians are now living in Poland, and then Germany. So European countries mostly. Canada. Yes. Yeah, thank you. Canada. But I think Poland took took the pressure, you know, of us. But yeah. Yeah. You know, when people are asking me how they can help, I would say, if you support Ukraine, keep, demonstrate your support. Because for us, it's important when people ask, just simply ask, how are you? I know that you are going through these challenges. How are you? You know, what do you feel? Of course, you know, if you if you want to help in terms of humanitarian help, or even you want to donate for military needs, we do have a wonderful platform created by the best people in Ukraine. It's called United 24. If you Google it, you will find the website. This is a platform, again, United 24. It is initiative of our president. And it allows you to donate for anything that you want, not just military. They have different initiatives. You can just pick up the one that you need, because they are gathering money for renovation of destroyed houses or military needs, of course, or humanitarian aid. So this is the best platform that I can suggest. And you will find some interesting information about Ukraine there, as well. Any other questions? No. Okay. Then thanks, everybody, again. I really appreciate you came today to my session. And I hope the war will be over. And Ukrainian Drupal community will join us next DrupalCon, because I'm sure the people there, they would love to be here. But they are doing this important job at the moment. Thank you. Thank you.