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It is already mid-July, and while summer is in full swing the weather doesn’t seem to know it quite yet. However, unlike the variable weather, our tradition of helping open-source projects and charities every month remains constant. This month, for the first time, the beneficiaries were selected by Viktor Petrenko, who has been with our Łódź team for a couple of months now.

Viktor has decided our donation should go to the Linux Foundation, which supports the development of the Linux operating system. All of our team members agree with the choice, because we’ve all used Linux on workstations, laptops, servers, and phones (most of us have Android-based handsets) for years. We would like to thank the foundation for all its work so far, and we hope its future efforts to make Linux ever stronger will continue to be successful.

Our other July donation, according to Viktor, goes to the World Cancer Research Fund, an organization that supports research into how lifestyle, particularly nutrition and physical activity, affects cancer risk. Since its foundation in 1982 it has raised over 100 million dollars to fund scientific research, significantly advancing our knowledge of cancer and cancer prevention.

During our last team meetup, which was held on June 30th, Marcin Tabaka gave a presentation on the Underscore.js library. Marcin did an overview of most of the functions provided by the library and demonstrated their use with numerous examples.

Because the presentation is quite lengthy, we decided to split it into two parts. Today, we’re publishing the first one, which covers functions that work with collections and arrays. The second part will be available in the next couple of days.

It is time for June’s instalment of Sidnet’s support initiative for open source projects and the needy. Angelika Kłopotowska, who joined our team at the beginning of the year, made her first picks in her new role as the person responsible for the selection of donees.

Since joining us, Angelika has acted on our recommendation and started using various new open source software. Consequently, she chose KeePassX, a password management application, for our financial support this month. KeePassX has already been praised by other members of the team in the past and fittingly it also received our support back in February of last year. Once again we congratulate the developers for the successful project and keep our fingers crossed for its further development!

Additionally, we joined forces with the “Mam Marzenie” (“I have a dream”) foundation, and made the dream of 8-year-old Wiktoria come true. She dreamed of her first touchscreen phone – and it had to have a pink casing. Wiktoria, the pink phone you wanted so badly will be in your hands in just a few days. All the best to you and the “Mam Marzenie” foundation!

Last Saturday our team had the monthly meetup that we usually organize at the end of each month, alternately in our office in Warsaw and in Lodz. This time Lodz was the location, and sadly not everyone could attend, but the vast majority of us were there.

In the past during these meetups, we sometimes did presentations on technical topics – so this time we thought, why not make this into something that we do on a regular basis.

The topic of May presentation, which was made by my humble self, was “RESTful Web Services” – something that many of our team members deal with every day, mostly by being consumers of various web APIs, but not necessarily know the ideas behind REST and how it couples with the HTTP protocol. The presentation is an overview of the design principles that RESTful web APIs should stick to with examples of how this is (or isn’t) achieved.

I’ve put the slides up on Speaker Deck, so now everyone can have a look. A basic knowledge of web APIs and HTTP should probably be considered a prerequisite.

Expect more presentations from our future meetups – I can’t promise we will deliver one every month, as some will probably be too specific to the projects that we’re working on, but we’ll try to cover general topics most of the time. Also, if you have some feedback that you would like to share, drop us a note.

For good measure, here are two poor quality photos of yours truly speaking to the team:

(And yes, that’s beer that some of us are holding – the meetup gradually turned into a drinkup and then an evening of bowling!)

It’s the 37th edition of our monthly donation initiative for open source projects, charity organizations and others in need. What is more, today is its third anniversary!

Choosing who will get financial aid this month was supposed to be Jakub’s job. However, since it’s the grand jubilee he decided to include other members of the team in the decision-making process. Together we have selected three recipients that we would like to support – organizations working on development of the programming languages we use most often: The Perl Foundation, who lays the groundwork for the development of Perl, the Python Software Foundation, dealing with Python, and the Mozilla Foundation, who steers work on JavaScript.

We’re also helping Weronika Kwakszys, a girl suffering from encephalopathy and who is under the care of the “Help on Time” Children’s Foundation. Jakub knows Weronika’s parents and he has decided that this month we should donate funds for her treatment. We send our best wishes to you, Weronika, and we wish you and your parents all the best.

The fourth year of our monthly donation initiative has begun. See you next time, in a month!

It’s mid-April, so it is high time we made our donation to our open source project and charity organisation of choice, as we do every month. This time, Krzysiek Skarbek did the selecting: he chose the Solr project and the “Unwanted and Forgotten” Foundation from Lodz.

Solr is a highly efficient universal information search platform, based on the Lucene library. Both projects are being developed together (as “Lucene/Solr”) by the Apache Software Foundation. We have been using Solr in our work as a search mechanism for a few web applications that we build for our customers. We would like to thank the creators and ASF for their efforts in developing the project.

The “Unwanted and Forgotten” Foundation was established in 2006 in Lodz; its purpose is to help homeless animals by finding new homes for them, as well as sterilization and interventions in cases of abused animals. This is the second time we have financially helped this foundation; we made a previous donation back in January 2013.

A big thanks goes to the foundation’s employees and volunteers. We wish them perseverance and the best of luck in the future!