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Today is a day for celebration: it’s been four years since we launched our initiative to provide regular support for open-source projects and charitable organisations!

For the past four years we have focussed on supporting projects that we find useful in our day-to-day work, such as developer tools, libraries/frameworks, etc. Today, we would like to recognise a project that, while not strictly about programming, is an essential tool in our business: the LibreOffice productivity suite.

LibreOffice came about in 2010 as a fork from OpenOffice.org, after it was acquired by Oracle. The LibreOffice project is run by the Document Foundation, founded to oversee its development.

Our 4th anniversary support also goes to the Committee for Helping Animals Association, which has been out there doing the right thing since 1998. It runs the Rescue Haven for horses and other animals. By the way, it was the first organisation to receive our support four years ago, so it holds a special place in our hearts.

This entry officially marks the start of the 5th year of our action. Visit us soon to check out our next month’s edition!

It’s already mid-April, and time once more for our next round of donations. This month the choice was with Mariusz Kalota for the first time.

Mariusz has decided our support should go to the Git project, which means it’s now the third time we have supported it as part of our initiative. Git (and recently GitLab) has become an essential tool for our day-to-day work, and using it is now “second nature” for most of our team. Many thanks and regards to all involved in the development of the project!

Our donation also goes to Michałek Flakowski, a boy from Mariusz’s home place of Teresin, who has been fighting leukaemia for a year. Michałek, we send you and your family our warmest regards, and hope that you recover as soon as possible.

The slides of the presentation from our February meetup are now up on Speaker Deck. This comes a bit late, but it’s kind of in the spirit of the subject of the presentation, which is Perl 6 – the next gen version of Perl, released by the end of last year after whole fifteen years of design/development.

It’s that time again for our monthly tradition where we make donations to an open-source project and a charitable organisation. For March these were selected by Paweł Adamczak.

Since Paweł is the biggest enthusiast of Python and the Django framework on our team (by the way, he gave a Django presentation at a meetup recently), his choice was of course Django. The rest of our team like the idea, as Django has been very useful for a couple of our recent web projects.

Django has been out there since 2005. The first version was developed by programmers at the Lawrence Journal-World newspaper, but since 2008, the project has been maintained by the Django Software Foundation. As always, congratulations to the developers! Thank you for your efforts, and we hope the project continues to be successful!

The other donation this month goes to Human Rights Watch, an organisation that has monitored the protection of human rights worldwide for almost 40 years. Small as our contribution is, we are happy to support HRW in its mission.

With the first half of February already behind us, it is time for us to help others. Just as history repeats itself, February of both this and last year saw Krzysiek Pisera making the choices as to who should receive our aid this month. It seems that Krzysiek also likes to repeat himself, as he has again chosen the Vim editor and the Animal Shelter in ‎Łódź.

According to the will of Vim’s creator, for many years the donations to the editor have gone to the organisation he founded – ICCF Holland, with its mission to help children in Uganda. The organization supports the Children’s Centre in Kibaale, which accommodates 700 children orphaned due to AIDS. We are glad that once again we can contribute to this noble cause.

This is the fourth time that we have shown our support for the Animal Shelter in Łódź. As usual, we give the shelter’s staff, volunteers and animals our best wishes.

At the recent January meetup of our team, Paweł Adamczak had a presentation on Django, his beloved Python web framework. The slides from that presentation are now up on Speaker Deck (and yes, the presentation is about the framework, no matter what the first few slides seem to suggest – classic Paweł).