If I had to distill who Mislav was in two sentences, it would be this tweet of his. He always sought to befriend, never to antagonize.

I met Mislav when he was a baby. Not an actual physical baby, mind you, but he was a baby to me and his sister, my very dear friend that I went to high school with. Think Dexter and Dee-Dee. We saw him as someone who'd outlive us both and never once questioned that belief until May 13th 2025, the day he unexpectedly passed. Maybe that's why the news is weighing so heavily on me even as I write this days later. Even then, he was a very sweet young man who had that spark of unbridled curiosity that is so uncommon in everyday people around us, a brilliance which is not obvious only to the malicious or the ignorant. That same brilliance is often isolating because the people who get us are few and far between, literally and physically. In the "real world", we learn to live a very lonesome life, but online...

Unbeknownst to most people, we have thriving social lives online in communities where we bond with others like us. We use alias names which become as real to us as our given names. This article is, in big part, for all of Mislav's friends who are soon going to get worried that he's no longer logging in. Approximately by the time this article gets indexed by Google, as our usual cope is that they're either working or on a vacation and lasts for about two weeks.

Cheeky as he was, hailing from Slavonia in Croatia, one of his public-facing and most persistent usernames online was Krofna and Krofnica. A bit of a tongue twister for Westerners, it means donut. But not the dog tier Amerikanski ones, the legit babushka stuff that was often made during the Kolinje season (traditional pig slaughter in November) and other fancy occasions. Generally they don't have a hole in the middle and were filled with pekmez (jam), which is clearly superior. If you imagined a torus, Mislav is definitely sighing at your uneducated peasant ass.

Mislav was a 90s kid (albeit a little late to the party), just like most of us who knew him. From an early age, it was easy to see he wasn't a regular kid. Every mom likes to think their child is special, but Mislav genuinely was.

Unlike all of us, through his early life exposure to interactive entertainment, his natural inclination for figuring out how things work sparked an interest in computing, learning to program computers at an age when most of his peers were still struggling with registering on Facebook and installing sixteen viruses in a trench coat because they ran Kletva_Kralja_Zvonimira.exe thinking it would actually play a song. His sisters included.

This interest naturally grew into a love of mathematics, in which he eventually successfully majored in, earning himself a position at Google. A kid from war-torn Slavonia, from humble beginnings and countless setbacks, the son of a war veteran, did all that.

As brilliant as he was, he was also very reserved. A man of few words socially and hard to gauge emotionally. It's not that he didn't feel things, just found it hard to express it, a trait we both share. Being vulnerable is hard for anyone, but especially so for brilliant people like Mislav. I got to know him in recent years a lot better, we joked a lot about politics in our favorite neighboring country, discussing math, physics, advances in many of the fields that are encompassed by computer science. I even got to learn a thing or two from him, the boy I drove home from the train station all those years back.

Mislav didn't want to go, but he couldn't stay. Remember him from time to time, I know I will. The universe exhibits periodic patterns on every scale, so I am certain we'll meet again. We won't remember any of this, but we'll recognize each other, I'm sure of it.