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Even though it’s summer outside, we wouldn’t be ourselves if we got distracted by (mostly) beautiful weather and neglected our monthly tradition of supporting one open source project and one nonprofit organization.

In July it was Wojtek Wąsik who had the privilege of choosing the causes that we will donate to. For the open source project, he went with Notepad++ – a source code editor that he uses ever since he can remember. As the author states on the Notepad++ website, his aim was to keep the CPU load low and therefore contribute to reducing the world carbon dioxide emissions.

We are also supporting the Natural Heritage Foundation, which operates within the area of Bieszczady, Wojtek’s favourite mountains. The organization takes care of animals in the Puszcza Karpacka forest, popularises this region in Poland and abroad, promotes local products and engages in investments which connect humans’ interests with nature protection and lead to creation of new jobs.

We wish both projects lots of success!

Last month we celebrated our anniversary, and today, in a more customary but still enthusiastic way, we are back to supporting open source projects and charities. This month the choice of beneficiaries was handled by Krzysiek Pisera, one of our longest standing team members, with nearly nine years’ experience: he is one of the few who remember the very beginnings of our initiative.

Krzysiek is even more faithful to Vim, the text editor for programmers, which he has been using since the day he was born (well, maybe not for that long, but he probably doesn’t remember exactly when himself). It is a peculiar tradition within a tradition, where Krzysiek has chosen this particular project to be the beneficiary of our financial support almost every time he was given this opportunity, making this year the fourth time in history. As Bram Moolenaar, the creator of Vim, has for years re-donated all the funds collected for Vim to ICCF Holland, helping Ugandan children in need, we also indirectly contribute to this cause. Bram and ICCF Holland: thank you!

We are also providing financial support to the Foundation for Polish Science, which runs the “START” program to help the most talented young scientists to begin their careers, and to create a friendlier work environment for them. We send our regards to the foundation and all the young researchers who participate in the program!

Today marks a great anniversary! No, we’re not talking about the 90th anniversary of the first Mickey Mouse cartoon… On this day, six years ago, we began our donations to open source projects and charity organisations.

Under this initiative, every month a different person from our team chooses who should receive financial aid from us, and there are always two beneficiaries: an open source project (usually one that has been useful in some way in our work) and an organisation engaged in charity. Over these past six years we have made almost a hundred and fifty such donations, to several dozen projects, foundations, orphanages, animal shelters and individuals in need.

A “side effect” of this campaign is that we have become the friends and helpers of several organizations – especially the “Little Brothers of the Poor” association and “Sarcoma” association.

Let’s get to the point! In this, our anniversary month, Marcin Tabaka has selected the following recipients for our support: the Webpack project and Jakub Ułanowicz (through the “Help on Time” children’s foundation).

Webpack is a tool to ease working with code and resources (such as JavaScript libraries or CSS files) in web projects. Marcin and other web developers at our company use it happily in several websites and applications. As always, we wish to thank the authors and congratulate them on their successful project!

Kubuś Ułanowicz is a nine-year-old boy with autism. With the support of the “Help on Time” children’s foundation, his parents try to give him opportunities to function and cope in everyday life – at school and in his contacts with his peers. Kubuś needs rehabilitation and therapy, mainly psychological and speech therapy, which of course means expenses. We previously helped Kubuś a couple of years ago, and today we are happy to do so again, while at the same time sending our best wishes to Kubuś and his parents.

Finally, we wish all the best to ourselves on this sixth anniversary, and officially start the seventh year of our campaign!

April is upon us, and the weather it brings is so sunny and warm that we have already forgotten the winter. What we have not forgotten, though, is our monthly drive to support open source projects and charity organisations – and this month the chooser is (for the fourth time in history) Dawid Jancen.

Just as we did exactly one year ago, we (more specifically Dawid) have decided to financially assist the JS Foundation, which works to support the development of various open source projects that make up the JavaScript ecosystem. In our everyday work we make use of many tools supported by the JS Foundation, such as webpack, ESLint, RequireJS, as well as good old jQuery and jQuery UI. Our thanks go to the projects’ developers and the JS Foundation crew!

The other recipient of our help this month is the homeless animal shelter in Dawid’s hometown of Tczew. This is not the first time we have helped the shelter either – the last time was back in January 2016, when we helped treat Diego, a severely neglected dog rescued from his soulless owner. We were pleased to find out that Diego has recovered fully and found a new home. We hope that the other animals at the shelter have the same luck!

March this year has been a mixed bag so far – it has both chilled us to the bone and given us a glimpse of the spring sun. The weather is, to put it simply, unstable. We remain unchanged, however, in our monthly tradition of financially helping open source projects and charity organisations. Michał Dziekoński, our front-end programming veteran, was responsible for picking the beneficiaries this time around.

Michał has spoken, and so we lend our support to the KeePassXC project, a password manager for Linux, Windows and macOS. KeePassXC is a good example of how open source software really works, as it is a fork of the KeePassX project (which has already received our support on multiple occasions in the past). The new project was developed on the initiative of programmers who wanted to introduce new functionalities to the software faster, and decided to develop their own version. We wish them all the best in their work on KeePassXC!

We have also elected to support the Foundation of the Friends of the Friars Minor, set up in 2010, and which since 2012 has operated an animal shelter in Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki. This is the third time that we have chosen to help the Foundation and, as always, we are thankful for all the effort they put into saving animals. We wish them all the best!

We’re halfway through February, and since it’s also Valentine’s Day, it’s the perfect time to show that we have a good heart by choosing an open source project and a charity to support, just like we do each month. This month, it was the first time for Sebastian, the person responsible for project implementation in our team, to choose the beneficiaries.

As a great film enthusiast, though not necessarily always an enthusiast of great films, Sebastian decided to support VideoLAN, the organisation which develops one of the best media players – VLC. VLC has been around for over 17 years, and it is available for all popular operating systems and mobile devices. It also comes in over 40 language versions. We are very grateful for this wonderful program and wish the creators all the best in its further development!

We’re also making a donation to the Animal Shelter in Korabiewice, run by Viva! Foundation. The shelter cares not only for many cats and dogs but also for horses, cows, goats, and other livestock animals. The shelter has had a fairly rough history – up until 2012, it was in the hands of people who kept the animals in terrible conditions – people who didn’t look after them, but made them suffer instead. Fortunately, there were others who weren’t so insensitive to the animals’ fate. They took over the shelter and have been providing the animals with the best conditions possible for six years now. Thank you and best regards!

We have already cleaned up the last of the confetti, and finished the remaining New Year’s champagne, so for the first time in this new year we continue our monthly tradition of helping open source projects and others in need. The task of selecting who to support was assigned to Wojtek Siewierski. He has been working with us for over a year, but this is his first opportunity to take this honourable role.

Wojtek decided that in January we should aid the GnuPG project, an encryption software package which our team has been using for years to secure e-mail correspondence. We previously showed our appreciation for GnuPG back in 2013, when we first gave financial support for the project – and now we are doing it again without hesitation. By the way, we’d like to send our thanks and belated birthday wishes to the package developers, as GnuPG recently celebrated the twentieth anniversary of the release of its first version (December 20th, 1997). Thank you, and we wish you all the best!

Through the Avalon Foundation we are also providing aid to Marcin Sztrubel, who for over ten years has been struggling with progressive muscular atrophy. Marcin himself tries to help others suffering from similar diseases by participating in the Polish Society for Neuromuscular Diseases. However, to be able to continue to do so and to enjoy life, he requires constant specialist and expensive rehabilitation. We hope we can help him to finance it, at least to a small extent. We wish you all the best, Marcin!

For the last five years, Christmas time has been about giving a present to our friends from one of many charitable organisations. It is our tradition to perform a small project which helps an organisation in achieving its goals.

This year our Christmas project is the expansion of the website for Onkobieg, a charitable running event organised by the “Sarcoma” Association. A couple of months ago we created a new version of the Onkobieg website and introduced the ability to register for the event via the Internet. Even back then the Association had further plans to develop the website, so we’ve decided that this would be a perfect fit for our Christmas project.

The most important implemented website function is the ability to provide recurring donations by the Onkobieg website visitors. Those who want to regularly support the event will be able to do so conveniently by turning on monthly automatic payments. We are also working on a new form, which will allow site visitors to register as a voluntary contributor to help with Onkobieg events.

Our project is still in the works – unfortunately we don’t have as many elves to help us as Santa does. Most of the new features are, however, ready. They are being extensively tested at the moment and will become visible on the Onkobieg website in a couple of days (we will inform you about this).