ISSUE 307: Software Dev in Ukraine

“Leveraging open source technology means reducing the barrier to entry in deploying state-of-the-art AI tooling.”

Software Dev in Ukraine

This week we ran a special episode of The New Stack Makers podcast in which we speak with three developers who are trying to remain productive while their homeland is being decimated.

Our U.K. correspondent Jennifer Riggins spoke with Ukrainian developer Anastasiia Voitova. Voitova, the head of customer solutions and security software engineer at Cossack Labs, just grabbed her laptop and some essentials when she suddenly fled to the mountains last month to “a small village that doesn’t even have a name.” She doesn’t have much with her, but she has more work to do than ever.

Riggins also spoke with Oleksii Holub, open source developer, software consultant and GitHub Star, and Denys Dovhan, a frontend engineer at Wix. All three of them are globally known open source community contributors and maintainers. And all three had to suddenly relocate from Kyiv this February. This conversation is a reflection of the lives of these three open source community leaders during the first three weeks of the Russian invasion.

Don’t forget though, the Ukrainian invasion affects everyone in open source, not just those living there. “I believe [the] open source community is deeply connected and blocking access for Russian developers, might cause serious issues in the infrastructure. A lot of projects are actually made by Russian developers, for example, PostCSS, Nginx, and PostHTML,” Dovhan said.

Click here to listen to the interview in full.

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