Category Archives: Uncategorized

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!

It’s summertime – and while, properly speaking, it is neither astronomical nor truly meteorological summer yet, it is summer nonetheless. With the sunbeams shining, we arrive at the June instalment of our monthly financial support campaign for open-source projects and charities.

Today we decided to repeat our choice from exactly a year ago. Our financial support goes to the Perl Foundation, which has been operating since 2000, working on developing the Perl programming language and other related projects. Perl is one of the programming languages which we have continued to use for many projects since the very inception of our business. We are grateful to the Perl Foundation for their efforts, and wish them all the best for their present and future projects. We hope that our contribution will indeed be of help.

Our support also goes to the “Cat’s Claw” Animal Foundation in Poznań. Established in 2006, the foundation is dedicated to helping animals, stray cats in particular. In giving our support, we thank all the people involved in the Foundation’s efforts, and we also wish the best for the volunteers and for the felines under their care.

As it’s already mid-month, it’s time for our traditional campaign to support open-source projects and charities. And since it’s also May, then this month marks another anniversary of the campaign: it’s been five years!

Such an occasion doesn’t happen every day, so we would like to celebrate it in a special way, by providing “extra” support for the two organisations we helped in the first edition of our project, way back in 2012. These are the FreeBSD Foundation, which manages the development of the operating system under the same name (we have been using it in our network for years), and the Committee for Helping Animals Association, which has run the Rescue Haven for horses and other animals for several years.

Apart from the anniversary beneficiaries, the “regular” ones were picked by our tireless developer, Mariusz Kalota.

Mariusz chose the PuTTY project, a program for connecting to remote servers via SSH. PuTTY has been the most popular SSH client for Windows users for years, and it has even been ported to other operating systems. The project has turned 18 this year. Congratulations to the authors, and keep up the good work!

Mariusz’s other choice, which we make through the “Help on Time” Children’s Foundation, is a donation to Marcelek Machowski, a boy of less than seven who was born with spina bifida and requires expensive rehabilitation and treatment every day. Here’s all the best to you, Marcelek, and to your parents!

April is unique for its changeable weather, but no matter whether it rains or shines, today is the fifteenth, so it’s time to choose who we want to support this month. The decision who receives April’s donations were up to Krzysiek Pisera.

We mostly do web development, and JavaScript is one of the languages we use most frequently. Krzysiek has decided we should support the JS Foundation, which oversees a number of JavaScript projects. The foundation was established last October, following the merger of the jQuery Foundation and the Dojo Foundation. The most popular projects it maintains include jQuery, Dojo Toolkit, Grunt and ESLint. The latter has proven particularly useful in our everyday work on large JavaScript projects.

Our other donation goes to Patryk Arkita from Zgierz, Krzysiek’s home town. Patryk needs treatment due to a complicated heart condition. We wish him the best of luck and send our warmest thoughts, and encourage the readers of our blog to support Patryk and the JS Foundation as well.

Spring is coming fast – it is already the middle of March. This means it’s time to provide financial support for another open source project and for somebody who needs help. This time Dawid Jancen makes the choices.

The first of the March donations goes to the Linux Foundation, which has been working since 2000 to support the development of Linux, and they have already received a donation from us back in July 2015. Most of our team uses Linux on their own desk computers and laptops, as well as the servers for the projects we work on – that’s why this foundation’s activity is close to our hearts. We send our regards to them all, wishing them good luck in the further development of the operating system with the penguin mascot!

This month we are also helping Karolina Pastwa from Tczew. While Dawid and Karolina have never met, they do have mutual friends, and hence his decision to support her. She suffers from a neuroendocrine tumour of the small intestine. Karolina fights for health, not just for herself but also for her son. Karolina, please accept our regards; we are keeping our fingers crossed and hoping that your whole family can be healthy.

Frost and winter have not stood in our way in designating the next monthly beneficiaries of our financial assistance. In February, Tomek Antosik held the honourable function of making the selection.

The open source project that Tomek has decided to distinguish is Redmine, a web-based project management system released under the GPL license. Redmine has for many years been an essential tool in the work of our entire team, so it appears as our choice for the third time. As always, we would like to thank the developers for this great tool and wish them good luck in their further work on its development.

We are also providing support for Kubuś Zwiech. A multi-organ dysfunction resulting from congenital metabolic disease means that Kubuś requires specialized help, motor rehabilitation, neurological speech therapy treatments and sensory integration. Thanks to his hard work and that of his parents, an improvement has been observed in his motor development and muscle tension. His parents are collecting money to continue his rehabilitation – and we are glad that we can help even a little bit. We are sending hugs to you, Kubuś, and to your parents, as well as keeping our fingers crossed and wishing you the soonest possible effects of the treatments, plus much strength in your fight against the disease.

The new year has begun, so it is time for the January instalment of our monthly financial support campaign for open-source projects and charities. This time the beneficiaries were selected by Marcin Tabaka.

On his initiative, we decided to support a project called Laravel DataTables, which is (as is often the case) used by some of our team in their everyday work. It is a useful add-on to the PHP framework, and it facilitates use of the jQuery DataTables plugin in various web applications. In our case, it is used in the implementation of a control panel for our proprietary CMS system. Thanks and regards to the developers!

We have also made a donation through Siepomaga.pl to Mikołaj Zalega, who suffers from a rare condition called TRAPS. The aim is to buy the drugs that will give this lad a chance of avoiding recurrent severe fevers in the future. Mikołaj, we wish you much luck in persevering in your struggle for health. Wishing you and your parents all the best.

Following last week’s announcement, we bring news about this year’s Christmas project. This is already the fourth time that we carry out a project for a charity prior to Christmas time – for free. This year our task was to upgrade the website for the “Westies for Adoption” foundation.

The foundation is run by a group of dog lovers devoted to West Highland White Terriers. Its mission, as the founders say, is to:

”(…) help the white terriers of character, with more and more of them ending up on the streets, abused and exhausted. We arrange adoptions, help many organizations and foundations, find the best homes for our animals, and do not indulge the whims of people just looking for a popular puppy. We restore these terriers’ dignities, and rebuild their faith in people”.

Within our project, we moved the Foundation’s website to a new CMS and introduced fresh mechanisms for handling pre-adoption questionnaires, votes and auctions. We hope that this more attractive website will help the Foundation find responsible owners for as many needy dogs as possible.