Olha Svyripa was woken up at 5.30am on 24 February to what she described as "the warmest hug I ever had from my husband".

"He said 'please wake up, it's begun'."

Two hours later, she was crammed into a small van with her husband, her best friend and four strangers, to begin what turned into an 18-hour journey from Kyiv to the relative safety of Rivne, in the west of Ukraine.

"We packed the most important stuff - documents, laptops, chargers. My husband filled my backpack with books and said: 'It might be heavy but will protect you in case of shelling'."

• Hear more from tech workers in Ukraine on this week's Tech Tent

• Also on the show we discuss whether Russia is going to cut itself off from the internet

• Plus how much of the conflict is being played out in real-time on social media

• And how one man is running a mass email campaign to counter disinformation about the conflict

Olha's laptop was important because she, like many Ukrainians, wanted to carry on working despite the complete upheaval of her life and the dreadful circumstances she found herself in.

Doing so, she told the BBC, takes her mind off "the endless stream of news, and the constant anxiety" for her friends in the cities that are being heavily shelled.

She works for software firm Intellias, and the same story is told by many of her colleagues.

Oleksandr Bilyk lived in Kharkiv, close to the Russian border, and he knew that war was coming.

"Even in my worst scenario, I couldn't imagine we would wake up at 4.30am to explosions. But we did."

They gathered together all their family members - including their two-year-old son - and in the two family cars they embarked on a three-day drive west to Ivano-Frankivsk,

"The road was awful, hundreds of people leaving the city. At some point my wife had to breastfeed and she did it without stopping the car."

Co-workers and friends helped them in the two cities they stopped at along the way, and the local team from Intellias helped find them an apartment when they arrived. On the following Monday, Oleksandr went back to work.