Blog

Tis December and wintertime –
but indeed the changing weather
either makes the sky look fine
or look like it’d snow forever.

In contrast to this season, our commitment to supporting open source initiatives and charities is pretty much consistent, and just like in all the previous months, it’s now time for its latest installment. The last beneficiaries of this year have been chosen by Leszek Kalota, a programmer from Teresin, who’s debuting in this pleasant role.

Leszek chose to give the donation to the Git project, one of the most popular version control systems, without which we wouldn’t be able to work efficiently. We’ve already shown our gratefulness, helping the project already in 2012, 2015 and 2016. This will be the fourth time then. As before, we’d like to thank the programmers of Git for the meticulous development of their software, and we wish them all the best in their future work on the project!

The other beneficiary of this month is the “Mam Marzenie” (“I have a dream”) Foundation. Its mission is to make the dreams of children with life-threatening diseases come true. Since its inception in 2003, the Foundation has fulfilled over 7,000 such dreams, bringing joy to those children and letting them forget, at least for a moment, about their difficult struggles with illness. We’re very glad that we can contribute to this noble cause, and we hope that the Foundation will be able to make all dreams come true!

November has arrived, with leaves falling from the trees, along with the temperature and the rain. As is our monthly tradition, today we show our support for open source projects and charities. For November the aid recipients were selected by our fearless programmer, Tadeusz Sośnierz, better known as Tadzik.

Tadzik chose the Perl Dancer project, a framework for building web applications in Perl. We have known Dancer for a long time and successfully used the framework in a number of internal projects. Additionally, for five years we have been involved in a project in which Dancer plays (dances?) the main role. In recognition of these services, Dancer was featured on our blog as a supported project in 2015. Today we are happy to once again send financial aid to its creators and wish them success in developing the framework.

We also support the Association for Nature “Wolf”, which has engaged in nature conservation for more than twenty years. The association mainly helps predatory mammals, such as wolves, bears and lynxes. In its long history, it has received many awards for its work, including a prestigious prize from the National Geographic Polska magazine. We wish the association further success and are grateful for their contribution to the conservation of Polish predators.

It is mid-October, so the time has come to engage in the next round of our aid campaign. This month Jakub was responsible for selecting the open source project and the charity organisation that will be receiving our support.

Jakub decided to honour one of the projects that played a significant role in the recent reconstruction of our website and which is (with the help of other components) currently keeping it running. This project is Django, the most popular web development framework for Python. In addition to our own reconstruction work we have also used Django in several other undertakings, so the project has already seen our support on our blog. Therefore, once more, we thank the developers of Django and congratulate them on such fantastic work!

The second beneficiary of our aid is the “Help on Time” children’s foundation, and again this is not their first appearance as we have already provided assistance to them and the children they care for several times in the past. As usual, we give our donation together with our thanks to everyone involved in the foundation’s work. We wish them all the success in their future endeavours.

A few days ago we launched a new, thoroughly updated version of our website. We did it without much publicity or great pomp. No champagne popped either. However, we have decided that we should at least write a few words about it here, on our (also refreshed) blog.

What you can see at first glance is the new layout for the site, which is the work of our graphic designer, Marcin. We hope that you like it, and above all that you find it transparent and user-friendly in terms of convenient viewing on desktop and mobile devices.

Nevertheless, the new look of our site is just the tip of the iceberg because, most importantly, we have replaced the site engine. Drupal went into well-deserved retirement and gave way to Wagtail – a content management system written in Python and based on the very popular Django framework.

It was a kind of experiment and a challenge for us, because we had had no prior experience with Wagtail. It was actually just what we needed to put the site together “our own way”, while of course introducing lots of modifications and our own solutions. We got it right: after all web application programming is our daily bread. However, there are still some things that do not work the way we would like, so let’s just say that the site is running in its beta version, and we will continue to work on it.

We would like to use the occasion to thank all the authors of the bigger and smaller open source projects that we have enjoyed using to build our new website. These are:

• Wagtail
• Wagtail Blog
• Wagtail Menus
• Wagtail TinyMCE
• Wagtail Captcha
• and of course Django and Python

A big thank you from our entire team!