Blog

Although autumn is here, with its gloomy and rainy weather, we can lift our spirits up thanks to our monthly initiative supporting open source projects and charities. November’s recipients have been selected by Tomek Antosik.

Tomek has decided to support the Symfony Project, his favourite PHP framework for creating web applications. Symfony is one of the oldest frameworks – it dates back to 2005, which means that this year the project celebrates its 10th anniversary. Congratulations to the authors of the project, we hope they enjoy another successful 10 years!

Additionally, we are making a donation to the DKMS Foundation, which has been recruiting potential donors of haematopoietic stem cells and blood marrow in Poland since the beginning of 2009. We send our greetings to the employees and volunteers of the Foundation!

During our last team meetup that took place on October 30th, Krzysztof Skarbek had a presentation about Solr, the popular search engine. We have just published the slides on Speaker Deck for the world to see.

It is our long-standing tradition that on the fifteenth day of each month we are coming with financial support for open source projects and others in need. This month, the task of choosing beneficiaries was entrusted to Marcin Tabaka.

He chose to offer our support to the Eclipse Foundation established in 2004 and involved in developing several open source projects. Its flagship undertaking is Eclipse development environment which Marcin has been using for several years. The Eclipse Foundation already received our support in March last year – we are glad that we can offer our help this time as well. Many thanks to you and good luck in your future projects!

We have also joined the “Siepomaga” Foundation in raising funds for little Dominik, suffering from cerebral palsy. The collected money will allow a surgery using Ulzibat fibrotomy technique to be performed thanks to which the boy will get a chance to start walking. Best regards to you, Dominik, and your parents!

It’s time for the September edition of our monthly initiative to financially support open-source projects and charitable organisations. This time it was Michał Dziekoński who got to select the recipients.

Michał has been into the JavaScript React library for some time now, and decided we should donate something to Dan Abramov, the author of many useful components for the React library. Michał has used several of these while playing around with React, so he wanted to congratulate Dan on his great work – and the rest of our team joined in.

Michał has also decided that we should provide financial help to the Józefów Stray Animal Centre near Legionowo (Michał’s home region). The shelter and the foundation that runs it have been carrying out their work there for almost 20 years and, throughout this time, have found homes for hundreds of stray cats and dogs. Kudos to the shelter’s employees, volunteers, and four-legged residents!

A month ago, in the latest installment of our aid campaign, we complained about the weather, as it didn’t really do justice to this time of the year. The weather must’ve taken it personally, since now we’re faced with a 35-degree heat wave. Under these extreme conditions, the recipients of our support were chosen by Pattawan Kaewduangdee, who’s been working with us since March.

The first of the August donations will reach the Debian project, one of the most popular Linux distributions. At work, we frequently use Debian or distributions originating from it (like Ubuntu or Linux Mint) and we appreciate the effort the project’s creators are putting into its development – which we’ve already demonstrated once, supporting the project in May 2013. Thank you once again and regards to everyone involved in developing Debian!

We’re also supporting UNICEF – an organisation that needs no introduction, operating since the middle of the last century and engaged in helping those in need around the world, particularly children. The intended goal for our donation is help for the victims of the Nepal earthquake. We’re glad we can join this campaign and we thank UNICEF for this opportunity.

We’re finally posting a long-due report on the last meetup of our team which took place at the end of July. Having met two times in a row in Łódź, it was time for everyone to come to Warsaw.

We started off with a presentation made by Michał Dziekoński on ECMAScript 2015, the new standard of JavaScript. Using numerous examples, Michał demonstrated the new features of the language and showed how they can be useful in practice in web applications. The presentation was interesting and well done – and since it’s now available on Speaker Deck, we encourage anyone who wants to know more about ECMAScript 2015 to have a look.

The presentation was followed by the obligatory pizza, then the team headed to a go-kart track in the Bemowo district, where the first ever Sidnet Grand Prix race was to take place. After a tough and exciting competition, the top three racers were: