It was a balmy Friday afternoon and I had just walked in the door from grocery shopping when I received an urgent-sounding message from Ilyas Landikov. We’d been pairing up on some software projects recently, one of which was Easely. He was also using Easely to do his work, which made some alarm bells go off in my head when I received his message. Perhaps he found some workflow-shattering bug which would threaten the business.

“Hey there. Free for a quick chat?” is all he wrote.

A flash of worry came over me with the feeling of anxiety creeping up from my stomach and into my throat. It may have been 12:30 PM for me, but it was 12:30 AM for Ilyas. I swallowed hard, “yeah, what’s up?” I played it cool - no need to let my over-active mind take over. I took controlled breaths as I headed up to my computer to hop on a call, for his only response to my question was link to a Google Meet session.