Category Archives: Uncategorized

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.

With Christmas approaching it is time for our final monthly charity initiative of the year. This time our support goes to the beneficiaries chosen by Michał Dziekoński: the Let’s Encrypt project and the Friends of Animals foundation, the latter running an animal shelter in Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki.

The Let’s Encrypt project, launched in 2012, aims to provide free TLS certificates that can be acquired and installed in a simple, automated way. The project has enabled a wide range of users to apply encryption to their web servers, contributing to a greater level of security across the Web. The project sponsors include the Mozilla Foundation and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Congratulations! We wish the Let’s Encrypt team many more successes in developing their project.

We are pleased to announce that this is the second time that we are supporting the Friends of Animals Foundation and its animal shelter in Nowy Dwór Mazowiecki. Works to extend the shelter have been in progress for several years, and are described on their website. Best of luck with the extension, and all your other efforts to help homeless animals!

This is definitely not the end of our charitable activities this year, though. In December we are running our traditional Christmas project. Check back soon to learn more!

It’s mid-November and winter is coming soon. Our hearts are warm and ready for help, however. In other words, it’s time for our monthly donations. The recipients were picked by Viktor this month.

Our first donation goes to the PostgreSQL database project. Discussing its superiority to MySQL, a competing database, feels like debating whether Christmas is more important than Easter. Viktor, for one, is a committed supporter of PostgreSQL and will talk for hours about why it’s worth using. We’re not going to quote his arguments here but if you’d like to learn more, feel free to ask. Meanwhile, we would like to thank and send our regards to everyone involved in PostgreSQL development.

The other donation goes to the World Cancer Research Fund International. We are glad to make our small contribution to fund research that have helped to reduce cancer occurrence and save lives. Thank you!

That’s all for today. Check back soon to see who will receive our donations before Christmas next month.

If today is the fifteenth (and the calendar says it is), then it’s time for our support campaign. As we do every month, we provide financial support to a selected open source project and a philanthropic organisation – and this time the beneficiaries were chosen by our irreplaceable Angelika, for the second time in history.

Angelika remains faithful to her selection from last year, yet again choosing the KeePassX project, a password management tool for Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. KeePassX has been used for many years by Angelika and several other members of our team, so as a team we wish to thank the developers for the great job they do, and to wish them luck in developing the project.

We are also going to provide support for the “Roka” Animal Aid Foundation and the Shelter for Homeless Animals in Skierniewice (Angelika’s hometown). We wish all the best to the employees of the foundation, as well as the volunteers and the animals at the shelter!

This time we have two pieces of news for you and it is quite easy to guess that there is bad news and good news. The bad news is that the calendar inexorably heralds the middle of September and sunny summer days are almost over. The good news – is that it is high time to uphold our monthly tradition of supporting open source projects and charities! For the first time, the responsible task of selecting the recipients has been given to our new colleague Tadeusz “Tadzik” Sośnierz who joined us a few months ago.

Our support goes to OpenStreetMap Project, an initiative that has operated for the last 12 years in an attempt to create a commonly accessible and free map of the globe edited by the user community (similarly to Wikipedia). This ambitious project is managed by the OpenStreetMap Foundation established in 2006. It is especially notable that the maps created in the framework of the project have proven to be very useful for humanitarian organisations providing assistance to the needy in crisis situations, for example after the Haiti earthquake in 2010. We would like to express our appreciation to the creators of the project and the community and wish them every success in further endeavours.

This month we are also providing financial aid to “Na Paluchu” Animal Shelter, which is proud to be the oldest animal shelter in Warsaw dating back to the 1950s. Currently, the shelter is home to over 800 dogs and almost 100 cats – warm greetings to all of our four-footed friends and their two-footed helpers!

As it is already halfway through August, the time has come for a new edition of our monthly support initiative. This month the person responsible for the choice of beneficiaries is Jakub. He has decided that the financial aid should go to the Python Software Foundation and to Bartosz Radoń, who suffers from cerebral palsy.

Python is one of the languages which for several years now we have been using practically non-stop. We have previously supported the Python Software Foundation, which takes care of Python’s development, and we are happy to have an opportunity to do it again. We would like to thank the Foundation for all the activities undertaken so far and wish them luck in the years to come.

Bartosz Radoń is a four-year-old boy afflicted with cerebral palsy. With the aid of the “Miej Serce” Foundation, the family of Bartosz is raising money for an expensive surgery thanks to which the little boy may be able to walk. All the best to you, dear Bartosz!

The beauty of summer has arrived (well, sort of), and it’s time for the 51st edition of our monthly support initiative. This time it was Krzysiek Skarbek, a developer from our Łódź branch, who got to choose the beneficiaries.

Krzysiek is the team’s expert for the Solr search platform: he has been involved in Solr deployment for several of our website projects, and gave a presentation about it some months ago (available on Speaker Deck). This motivated his choice of the Solr project, which we also supported back in April of last year. Solr development is managed by the Apache Software Foundation, whom we would like to thank for its efforts in carrying out the project.

Our support also goes to Dawid Rutkowski, a six-year-old boy from Łódź who has battled cancer for a year and a half now. The “Happy Kids” Children’s Aid Foundation has been collecting donations to continue his treatment and fund a diet therapy. Dawid, we wish you and your parents the strength and endurance to beat your illness. Take care!

A month ago we celebrated the fourth anniversary of our initiative to provide support for open-source projects and charities. Today we are celebrating another little anniversary – we have already reached our 50th edition! This month the recipients were chosen by Rafał Bujak, a project manager from our Warsaw office.

Rafał focuses mainly on projects related to OTRS (Open-source Ticket Request System), and since OTRS is written in Perl he decided that our aid should go to the Perl Foundation. We have already supported the Perl Foundation in the past, as this is one of the languages that we use on a daily basis for many projects. Once again we would like to thank the Perl Foundation for the effort it puts into the development of the language, and wish them the best of luck in their work.

The second donation chosen by Rafał goes to Miłosz Kozon, a three-year-old boy from Wyszków (Rafał’s home town), who is under the care of the “Help on Time” Children’s Foundation. As Miłosz was born with spina bifida, myelomeningocele and hydrocephalus, he requires continuous treatment and rehabilitation. We hope that through our donation we can help him at least a bit. We send our best wishes to Miłosz and his parents!

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!