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Monthly Donations: Perl Dancer and the Association “Wolf”

Michał Wojciechowski November 15, 2017

November has arrived, with leaves falling from the trees, along with the temperature and the rain. As is our monthly tradition, today we show our support for open source projects and charities. For November the aid recipients were selected by our fearless programmer, Tadeusz Sośnierz, better known as Tadzik.

Tadzik chose the Perl Dancer project, a framework for building web applications in Perl. We have known Dancer for a long time and successfully used the framework in a number of internal projects. Additionally, for five years we have been involved in a project in which Dancer plays (dances?) the main role. In recognition of these services, Dancer was featured on our blog as a supported project in 2015. Today we are happy to once again send financial aid to its creators and wish them success in developing the framework.

We also support the Association for Nature “Wolf”, which has engaged in nature conservation for more than twenty years. The association mainly helps predatory mammals, such as wolves, bears and lynxes. In its long history, it has received many awards for its work, including a prestigious prize from the National Geographic Polska magazine. We wish the association further success and are grateful for their contribution to the conservation of Polish predators.

Monthly Donations: the Django Project and the “Help on Time” Children’s Foundation

Michał Wojciechowski October 15, 2017

It is mid-October, so the time has come to engage in the next round of our aid campaign. This month Jakub was responsible for selecting the open source project and the charity organisation that will be receiving our support.

Jakub decided to honour one of the projects that played a significant role in the recent reconstruction of our website and which is (with the help of other components) currently keeping it running. This project is Django, the most popular web development framework for Python. In addition to our own reconstruction work we have also used Django in several other undertakings, so the project has already seen our support on our blog. Therefore, once more, we thank the developers of Django and congratulate them on such fantastic work!

The second beneficiary of our aid is the “Help on Time” children’s foundation, and again this is not their first appearance as we have already provided assistance to them and the children they care for several times in the past. As usual, we give our donation together with our thanks to everyone involved in the foundation’s work. We wish them all the success in their future endeavours.

Our Brand New Site

Michał Wojciechowski October 6, 2017

A few days ago we launched a new, thoroughly updated version of our website. We did it without much publicity or great pomp. No champagne popped either. However, we have decided that we should at least write a few words about it here, on our (also refreshed) blog.

What you can see at first glance is the new layout for the site, which is the work of our graphic designer, Marcin. We hope that you like it, and above all that you find it transparent and user-friendly in terms of convenient viewing on desktop and mobile devices.

Nevertheless, the new look of our site is just the tip of the iceberg because, most importantly, we have replaced the site engine. Drupal went into well-deserved retirement and gave way to Wagtail – a content management system written in Python and based on the very popular Django framework.

It was a kind of experiment and a challenge for us, because we had had no prior experience with Wagtail. It was actually just what we needed to put the site together “our own way”, while of course introducing lots of modifications and our own solutions. We got it right: after all web application programming is our daily bread. However, there are still some things that do not work the way we would like, so let’s just say that the site is running in its beta version, and we will continue to work on it.

We would like to use the occasion to thank all the authors of the bigger and smaller open source projects that we have enjoyed using to build our new website. These are:

Wagtail
Wagtail Blog
Wagtail Menus
Wagtail TinyMCE
Wagtail Captcha
and of course Django and Python

A big thank you from our entire team!

Monthly Donations: Debian and the “Home for a Puppy” Foundation

Michał Wojciechowski September 15, 2017

Our holidays and summertime are over too fast, but we’ve already wiped the tears off our faces and are celebrating the middle of September by supporting yet another open source project and charitable organisation. This time, our brave programmer from Łódź, Krzysiek Skarbek, has selected the organisations.

Krzysiek is a long-time user and fan of Debian, one of the most valued Linux distributions, so he’s decided to support the project. Our team includes many users of other Linux systems based on Debian, like Ubuntu or Mint, so we all support his choice. We’re sending the Debian team some financial support along with our heartfelt regards.

We’ve also chosen to support the “Home for a Puppy” Foundation from Poddębice. Their aim is to help neglected and abandoned animals. The foundation is a new endeavour as it was created only last year, but it’s already clear that its team fulfils its mission efficiently and with commitment. Krzysiek found the organisation himself when he was seeking a home for a Labrador abandoned at the Przykona beach near Uniejów. According to him, the “Home for a Puppy” Foundation helped him immeasurably. We would like to thank them ourselves and send the foundation our best wishes!

Monthly Donations: The Mozilla Foundation and the “Prima” Labrador Retriever Rescue Foundation

Michał Wojciechowski August 15, 2017

Today we are celebrating a public holiday. That means we have the day off, and there will be no monthly donations… Just joking, of course. While others may be taking a small break, we’ll keep carrying out our donation campaign. This month, the recipients of our financial support have been chosen by Filip, a programmer from Poznań who has been cooperating with us for over a year.

As chosen by Filip, we give our support to the Mozilla foundation, a non-profit organisation established in 2003 to supervise the development of various projects, such as the Firefox web browser or the Thunderbird e-mail client. With time, the foundation has taken further steps to make the Internet open and innovative. Our team includes many users of Mozilla Foundation’s software and we also willingly avail ourselves of its other achievements such as the documentation resulting from the work on the Mozilla Developer Network. We have appreciated the foundation’s work for many years – and we gave them our financial support in 2014 and 2015. This year we are doing it again, feeling happy and grateful for the foundation’s activity. Surely it won’t be the last time!

We would also like to show our support for the “Prima” Foundation in Poznań. Since 2009, it has been helping Labrador Retrievers that have fallen victim to cruelty, either through neglect or abuse. The foundation is named after a female dog which after years of distress found a good owner and a happy new life. We wish all the best to the foundation and its dogs!

Monthly Donations: Libre Office and the “To Rescue Children with Cancer” Foundation

Michał Wojciechowski July 15, 2017

Holiday, vacation, and work is less and less on everyone’s minds… but our enthusiasm for the monthly tradition of supporting open source projects and charity organisations has not dwindled. In July, Ania Hawrył, our steadfast tester, has chosen the recipients of aid.

Ania has decided to support the Libre Office project, an office software package developed in 2010 (based on Open Office). Many members of our team use Libre Office in their daily work with documents and spreadsheets, and we have also utilised it to create many presentations (some of which can be viewed on our Speaker Deck profile). The specially established Document Foundation is behind the project – we’d like to thank it for the many years of effort in developing the package!

The second choice made by Ania is the „To Rescue Children with Cancer” Foundation. The Foundation has been operating for 26 years and has helped over 5,000 children with cancer. We are glad that we can have a small part in this aid and wish all the best to the whole Foundation and all the children under its care!

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