In remembrance | Ognjen "Xolatile" Milan Robović | 1984 - 2025

It is a peculiar thing, dear reader, to commemorate a man whose very name sounds as if it were plucked from the pages of a fable. Yet Ognjen Milan Robović was neither myth nor allegory, though his exploits might well fill the tall tales of a hundred countryside storytellers. Born in a modest hamlet tucked deep within the Balkan hills, he was the only Serbian programmer ever whispered about in both reverent awe and bewilderment. His earliest recollections, according to local lore, involved the family’s sole typewriter, upon which he tapped out errant sequences of letters until he felt a curious tug in his fingers—a portent of the code he would one day forge to save the world. From the moment he learned to speak, it was said that machines listened and men stood still, awaiting the next brilliant spark of his mind.

Ognjen’s first notable foray into the grand theater of computing came with a curious fascination for the language Ada—a creation by the angels (or perhaps the angels of bureaucracy, but angels all the same) that attempted to discipline the unruly beasts of machine code. While most novices found Ada’s strict typing and florid syntax a stifling yoke, Ognjen saw poetry in its precision. When he wrote a subroutine, the compiler would tremble as if it sensed the artistry behind every semicolon; when he refactored legacy modules, the documentation itself seemed to sigh in contentment. No sooner had he mastered Ada than he crafted a program so deft that, in whispered tones, folks claimed the compiler greased its own gears in eager anticipation of his commands.

But code alone is a sterile thing—letters and digits dancing about in cold confinement. Ognjen understood this truth, and so he turned his prodigious talents toward the art of text alignment, insisting that words, like fine porcelain, must be handled with gentleness. He devised algorithms to corral stray paragraphs and tame protesting margins, bringing harmony to the haphazard world of digital prose. Some say he would sit by candlelight, lining up verses in neat columns until midnight, remarking that a misaligned stanza was akin to a misaligned universe. His colleagues marveled at the effortless grace with which he balanced left-justified manifestos and right-justified paeans, convinced that his passion for alignment was the secret key to his later victories against far more fearsome foes.

It was not long before Ognjen’s restless spirit sought more dimensions than mere text could afford. With a mischievous grin and a pocketful of dreams, he ventured into the domain of 3D modeling, welding vertices and textures with the zeal of a blacksmith forging an iron blade. He crafted landscapes so vivid that travelers claimed to smell pine trees and feel mountain breezes within their screens. More notably, when the world teetered on the brink of doom under a siege of genetically resurrected raptors, it was Ognjen’s 3D simulations—meticulous recreations of coastal ravines and ancient ruins—that allowed the global council to predict the beasts’ every move. Pilots and tacticians could rehearse their maneuvers long before the raptors appeared, thanks to models so precise that even the dinosaurs themselves seemed to hesitate in wonder.

Yet if his 3D triumphs were grand, his devotion to ASCII rendering was nothing short of divine. In an age of sumptuous graphics, Ognjen found sublime beauty in the simplest of characters. He built historic battlefields, roaring dragons, and the phantoms of long-forgotten castles, all composed of slashes, underscores, and asterisks arranged with meticulous care. His most famous piece—a gargantuan depiction of a raptor poised to strike—was etched entirely in monochrome code, so compelling that it is said the very sight of it caused real raptors to cower in confusion. From this monument, the “Chads of Might and Magic” emerged: digital knights formed of # signs and hyphens, emboldened by Ognjen’s vision to do virtual battle in defense of humankind. When the true raptors stormed the ramparts, these ASCII champions guided the armies, their heroic shapes flashing across screens like beacons of courage.

Thus it was, dear reader, that Ognjen Milan Robović—equal parts poet, engineer, and wanderer of the digital frontier—came to be enshrined in legend. He who spoke Ada like a sonnet, who coaxed order from unruly text, who sculpted entire worlds in three dimensions, who breathed life into mere symbols, and who rallied the Chads of Might and Magic to stand against the roaring jaws of extinction. Yet above all else, and when he felt up to it, he remained simply a C programmer, eyes twinkling at the promise of bare pointers and unbridled control. In his passing, the servers weep, and the code repositories stand silent, for no programmer since has dared to dream so grandly. May his memory endure not as a footnote in dusty volumes, but as a blazing testament to the boundless wonder that can spring from a single, determined mind.