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It’s donations time! For the third time this year, we’re doing the monthly donations to open source projects and other good causes. The honor of selecting the project and organization to support has been given to Karol Janyst.

Being a devoted user of the Eclipse IDE, Karol chose it to be the project that we’re donating to this month. More precisely, the donation goes to the Eclipse Foundation, which supports the development of the Eclipse IDE software. The Foundation also runs a lot of other projects, mostly related to the IDE and extending its features. Thanks and congratulations to the Foundation for all that they have done for the development of open source programming tools, and all the best in the future!

As always, we’re also sending a donation to an organization that carries out charitable work, and this month it’s the Children’s Fantasy Foundation, founded in 2003 and dedicated to bringing a bit of happiness into the lives of terminally ill children by making their wishes and dreams come true. The wishes can be as small as a new toy, or as big as a trip to Disneyland. We are happy to contribute to the Foundation’s efforts and hope our donation will help bring a smile to a child’s face.

It’s high time for this month’s donations to open source projects and charities (we’re actually a bit late, since we traditionally do these on the 15th day of the month). Krzysztof Pisera had the privilege of selecting the project and organization to support.

The open source project selected by Krzysztof is KeePassX – an application that securely stores and manages passwords. In this day and age, when every Internet user has tens and hundreds of accounts/profiles on numerous websites, a tool like this is indispensable. KeePassX is used by a number of guys in our team, both on Linux and Mac OS X (there’s also a version for Windows – the program is truly multiplatform), and we all like it a lot. Hats off to the developers for a job well done!

We’re also making a donation to the “Paka dla bezdomniaka” (which can be loosely translated as “a gift to a homeless animal”) initiative, which was established to collect funds to feed the animals living in the shelter in Korabiewice. Among them are not only dogs and cats, but also horses, goats, and even bears. Many thanks to the caretakers of the animals in the shelter, and to the organizers of the campaign for their hard work!

Slightly more than a week ago, on January 9th, the Łódź Java User Group organized yet another screening of Uncle Bob’s video presentation. As usual, members of our team have attended the meetup, but this time our company was also sponsoring the video license (as we planned a few months back).

Before the presentation started, we had the opportunity to say a few introductory words about the company and what we do, and to treat the audience with delicious fudge candies wrapped with our logo.

The audience appreciated both the introduction (as evidenced by a series of insightful questions) and the candies (as evidenced by how quickly those were gone). Hopefully, we sparked the interest of some of the attendees and encouraged them to visit our website to learn more.

This episode of the series was an introduction to the so-called S.O.L.I.D. principles (Single responsibility, Open-closed, Liskov substitution, Interface segregation, Dependency inversion), which are an invention of Uncle Bob himself. Their purpose is to help programmers build systems that are easy to maintain and extend in the long run. Upcoming videos will explain each of those principles one by one.

To be honest, this episode seemed slightly less informative to me, when compared to the previous ones. Most of the material was presented in broad terms, with little practical details. On the other hand, this might have been the intention, and more specifics will come up in the subsequent videos. I’m sure soon we’ll have the chance to find out.

Here we come with a double announcement – firstly, it’s time for another round of donations to open source projects and charities, and secondly, it’s the first blog post since we rolled out a new design of our website, along with a revised logotype (and we hope you like it!).

This month, the recipients of our donations have been selected by Marcin Tabaka, and the open source project that he chose is a jQuery plugin called Tablesorter. While most of the time we donate to medium and large scale projects, the smaller ones like this plugin also deserve attention every now and then, as they can be just as useful in our job – like Tablesorter has proven to be for Marcin. The plugin, as its name suggests, allows web developers to easily add sorting features to HTML tables.

We are also sending financial help for Stas Kowaluk, a three-month-old baby boy who is suffering from arm paresis caused by birth complications. Stas is under the care of the Brachial Plexus Foundation, which helps people (both children and adults) with brachial plexus injuries. The Foundation and Stas’ parents are collecting money for his surgery and further treatment – we are happy to contribute to this cause.

We wish you all the best, Stas!

It’s the 15th day of the month, which means it’s time for our monthly donations. The organizations that we’re supporting this time have been selected by Grzegorz Błach.

Since Grzegorz is involved in the FreeBSD project, it was only natural for him to choose to donate to the FreeBSD Foundation, which is the organization behind that project (and which we already supported back when we were just starting this initiative of regular donations). We have been using FreeBSD on our company servers all through the nine years we’ve been in operation, and will happily continue to do so.

The second organization that we’re supporting this month is the “Panopticon” Foundation, which was formed in 2009 and is devoted to the protection of human rights in this age of rapidly developing technology. This is an excerpt from their mission statement:

Our mission is to protect human rights, in particular the right to privacy, in the clash with modern technology used for surveillance purposes. We want to analyse the risks associated with the operation of modern surveillance systems, monitor the actions of both public and private entities in this and intervene when human rights or democratic values are threatened.

We wish both the FreeBSD Foundation and the “Panopticon” Foundation all the best in their efforts.