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The new year has settled in for good – and since it is already past mid-January, then it is peak time for our customary monthly donations to open source projects and charity organisations. The pleasurable duty of choosing the beneficiaries fell to Dawid Jancen, who has been working as part of our team for three months now.

For the second time in our history, we are supporting the development of the well-known and popular revision control system – Git. We use it in our team for almost all the projects that we work on, so for us it is a basic tool, like a text editor or an email client. The donation to Git is transferred via Software Freedom Conservancy, a non-profit organisation which provides care for open source projects. We would like to say “thank you” to all who have contributed to the development of Git!

We are also providing financial support to the Destitute Animal Shelter in Tczew (Dawid’s hometown), contributing to treatment for a young puppy. This puppy, Astek, landed in the shelter in poor condition after being brutally hurt by people, in December. According to what we have learned, the vet’s efforts have brought good results as Astek has survived the most difficult time and is much better now. We send our greetings to Astek and all the employees and volunteers of the shelter in Tczew!

This is the last round of our monthly donations this year. As always, we’re supporting an open source project and a non-profit charity organization, and this time they have been selected by yet another newcomer to our Lodz team, Krzysztof Lipiec.

Krzysztof chose a project that already received our donation back in February last year, but we’re happily supporting it again, as it’s something that many of us continue to use on a daily basis – and that is JSLint, the code quality tool for JavaScript. Once again, big thanks to the creator of JSLint, Douglas Crockford.

The recipient of the second donation this month is the “Hobby Horse” Association, based in Lodz. The Association was founded in 2011 with the mission to support the children of the Little Children’s Home in Lodz. We send our best wishes to all the people of the Association, and of course to all the children under their care.

It’s already past mid-November, which means it’s high time for the next round of donations to open source projects and charity organizations. This month the team member responsible for selecting the recipients is Tomek Antosik, who joined us two months ago.

Per Tomek’s choice, we’re making a donation to OpenWrt, a Linux distribution for embedded devices, mostly network appliances. The original goal of the project was to develop an open source operating system for the popular Linksys WRT54G routers, and this was accomplished in 2004, when the first release of OpenWrt saw daylight. As the project progressed and gained popularity, support for more and more devices was added, and today there are hundreds of appliances that OpenWrt can run on.

The second recipient of this month’s donations is the “Tacy Sami” Association (the name can be roughly translated as “We’re All the Same”), founded in 1999 and based in Wieluń, Tomek’s home town. The Association provides help and care for people with disabilities and works towards their social integration.

The time has come for the next, October, edition of our initiative aimed at supporting open source projects and charity organizations. This month Marcin Tabaka, who has been cooperating with us for years, took care of selecting recipients.

Marcin selected a project that assists not only us in our work, but also helps some of our clients, namely the phpMyAdmin tool, which allows MySQL databases to be managed through a web browser. In many cases, this is the simplest manner of getting quick access to data stored on a server. It does not involve the need to use any other software, just a web browser.

PhpMyAdmin has a long history – in September, 16 years had passed since its first edition. We congratulate and thank the developers of the project.

We would also like to make a donation for the benefit of the “Na Paluchu” Homeless Animals’ Shelter – the oldest animal shelter in Warsaw, which has been functioning since 1953. We would like to thank the shelter’s employees and volunteers for their efforts aimed at helping animals.

August is now 54% done, the days are getting shorter, and schoolchildren have to begin facing the dreadful thought that the summer vacation will soon be over. What definitely is not over is our monthly donations initiative! The recipients of this month’s donations have been picked by the one and only Karol Pasternak.

The open source project that we’re supporting this month is Jenkins, the widely popular continuous integration tool. We have been using it in a few projects for quite some time now, and truly appreciate how it made our work easier.

The second donation that we’re making this month goes to the “Medor” Foundation from the small city of Zgierz. We already supported the Foundation back in June 2012 (shortly after we initiated the monthly donations), by virtually adopting a dog by the name of “Wafel” (which is Polish for “waffle”). A few months later it turned out he found a new home, which was great news to us! Wafel, we hope you’re a happy dog.

All the best to the Foundation’s team!