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Following last week’s announcement, we bring news about this year’s Christmas project. This is already the fourth time that we carry out a project for a charity prior to Christmas time – for free. This year our task was to upgrade the website for the “Westies for Adoption” foundation.

The foundation is run by a group of dog lovers devoted to West Highland White Terriers. Its mission, as the founders say, is to:

”(…) help the white terriers of character, with more and more of them ending up on the streets, abused and exhausted. We arrange adoptions, help many organizations and foundations, find the best homes for our animals, and do not indulge the whims of people just looking for a popular puppy. We restore these terriers’ dignities, and rebuild their faith in people”.

Within our project, we moved the Foundation’s website to a new CMS and introduced fresh mechanisms for handling pre-adoption questionnaires, votes and auctions. We hope that this more attractive website will help the Foundation find responsible owners for as many needy dogs as possible.

With Christmas approaching it is time for our final monthly charity initiative of the year. This time our support goes to the beneficiaries chosen by Michał Dziekoński: the Let’s Encrypt project and the Friends of Animals foundation, the latter running an animal shelter in Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki.

The Let’s Encrypt project, launched in 2012, aims to provide free TLS certificates that can be acquired and installed in a simple, automated way. The project has enabled a wide range of users to apply encryption to their web servers, contributing to a greater level of security across the Web. The project sponsors include the Mozilla Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Congratulations! We wish the Let’s Encrypt team many more successes in developing their project.

We are pleased to announce that this is the second time that we are supporting the Friends of Animals Foundation and its animal shelter in Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki. Works to extend the shelter have been in progress for several years, and are described on their website. Best of luck with the extension, and all your other efforts to help homeless animals!

This is definitely not the end of our charitable activities this year, though. In December we are running our traditional Christmas project. Check back soon to learn more!

It’s mid-November and winter is coming soon. Our hearts are warm and ready for help, however. In other words, it’s time for our monthly donations. The recipients were picked by Viktor this month.

Our first donation goes to the PostgreSQL database project. Discussing its superiority to MySQL, a competing database, feels like debating whether Christmas is more important than Easter. Viktor, for one, is a committed supporter of PostgreSQL and will talk for hours about why it’s worth using. We’re not going to quote his arguments here but if you’d like to learn more, feel free to ask. Meanwhile, we would like to thank and send our regards to everyone involved in PostgreSQL development.

The other donation goes to the World Cancer Research Fund International. We are glad to make our small contribution to fund research that have helped to reduce cancer occurrence and save lives. Thank you!

That’s all for today. Check back soon to see who will receive our donations before Christmas next month.

If today is the fifteenth (and the calendar says it is), then it’s time for our support campaign. As we do every month, we provide financial support to a selected open source project and a philanthropic organisation – and this time the beneficiaries were chosen by our irreplaceable Angelika, for the second time in history.

Angelika remains faithful to her selection from last year, yet again choosing the KeePassX project, a password management tool for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. KeePassX has been used for many years by Angelika and several other members of our team, so as a team we wish to thank the developers for the great job they do, and to wish them luck in developing the project.

We are also going to provide support for the “Roka” Animal Aid Foundation and the Shelter for Homeless Animals in Skierniewice (Angelika’s hometown). We wish all the best to the employees of the foundation, as well as the volunteers and the animals at the shelter!

This time we have two pieces of news for you and it is quite easy to guess that there is bad news and good news. The bad news is that the calendar inexorably heralds the middle of September and sunny summer days are almost over. The good news – is that it is high time to uphold our monthly tradition of supporting open source projects and charities! For the first time, the responsible task of selecting the recipients has been given to our new colleague Tadeusz “Tadzik” Sośnierz who joined us a few months ago.

Our support goes to OpenStreetMap Project, an initiative that has operated for the last 12 years in an attempt to create a commonly accessible and free map of the globe edited by the user community (similarly to Wikipedia). This ambitious project is managed by the OpenStreetMap Foundation established in 2006. It is especially notable that the maps created in the framework of the project have proven to be very useful for humanitarian organisations providing assistance to the needy in crisis situations, for example after the Haiti earthquake in 2010. We would like to express our appreciation to the creators of the project and the community and wish them every success in further endeavours.

This month we are also providing financial aid to “Na Paluchu” Animal Shelter, which is proud to be the oldest animal shelter in Warsaw dating back to the 1950s. Currently, the shelter is home to over 800 dogs and almost 100 cats – warm greetings to all of our four-footed friends and their two-footed helpers!