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During our last team meetup that took place on October 30th, Krzysztof Skarbek had a presentation about Solr, the popular search engine. We have just published the slides on Speaker Deck for the world to see.

It is our long-standing tradition that on the fifteenth day of each month we are coming with financial support for open source projects and others in need. This month, the task of choosing beneficiaries was entrusted to Marcin Tabaka.

He chose to offer our support to the Eclipse Foundation established in 2004 and involved in developing several open source projects. Its flagship undertaking is Eclipse development environment which Marcin has been using for several years. The Eclipse Foundation already received our support in March last year – we are glad that we can offer our help this time as well. Many thanks to you and good luck in your future projects!

We have also joined the “Siepomaga” Foundation in raising funds for little Dominik, suffering from cerebral palsy. The collected money will allow a surgery using Ulzibat fibrotomy technique to be performed thanks to which the boy will get a chance to start walking. Best regards to you, Dominik, and your parents!

It’s time for the September edition of our monthly initiative to financially support open-source projects and charitable organisations. This time it was Michał Dziekoński who got to select the recipients.

Michał has been into the JavaScript React library for some time now, and decided we should donate something to Dan Abramov, the author of many useful components for the React library. Michał has used several of these while playing around with React, so he wanted to congratulate Dan on his great work – and the rest of our team joined in.

Michał has also decided that we should provide financial help to the Józefów Stray Animal Centre near Legionowo (Michał’s home region). The shelter and the foundation that runs it have been carrying out their work there for almost 20 years and, throughout this time, have found homes for hundreds of stray cats and dogs. Kudos to the shelter’s employees, volunteers, and four-legged residents!

A month ago, in the latest installment of our aid campaign, we complained about the weather, as it didn’t really do justice to this time of the year. The weather must’ve taken it personally, since now we’re faced with a 35-degree heat wave. Under these extreme conditions, the recipients of our support were chosen by Pattawan Kaewduangdee, who’s been working with us since March.

The first of the August donations will reach the Debian project, one of the most popular Linux distributions. At work, we frequently use Debian or distributions originating from it (like Ubuntu or Linux Mint) and we appreciate the effort the project’s creators are putting into its development – which we’ve already demonstrated once, supporting the project in May 2013. Thank you once again and regards to everyone involved in developing Debian!

We’re also supporting UNICEF – an organisation that needs no introduction, operating since the middle of the last century and engaged in helping those in need around the world, particularly children. The intended goal for our donation is help for the victims of the Nepal earthquake. We’re glad we can join this campaign and we thank UNICEF for this opportunity.

We’re finally posting a long-due report on the last meetup of our team which took place at the end of July. Having met two times in a row in Łódź, it was time for everyone to come to Warsaw.

We started off with a presentation made by Michał Dziekoński on ECMAScript 2015, the new standard of JavaScript. Using numerous examples, Michał demonstrated the new features of the language and showed how they can be useful in practice in web applications. The presentation was interesting and well done – and since it’s now available on Speaker Deck, we encourage anyone who wants to know more about ECMAScript 2015 to have a look.

The presentation was followed by the obligatory pizza, then the team headed to a go-kart track in the Bemowo district, where the first ever Sidnet Grand Prix race was to take place. After a tough and exciting competition, the top three racers were:

Last month, we helped the “Mam Marzenie” (“I have a dream”) foundation make the dream of 8-year old Wiktoria come true. Her wish was to have a touchscreen phone in a pink casing. Now, the Foundation has sent us a few photos of the moment when Wiktoria received her long-awaited phone – we’re posting one of the photos below.

Once again, we send our best wishes to Wiktoria and the “Mam Marzenie” foundation!

As promised, we’re publishing the second part of Marcin Tabaka’s presentation on the Underscore.js library.

It is already mid-July, and while summer is in full swing the weather doesn’t seem to know it quite yet. However, unlike the variable weather, our tradition of helping open-source projects and charities every month remains constant. This month, for the first time, the beneficiaries were selected by Viktor Petrenko, who has been with our Łódź team for a couple of months now.

Viktor has decided our donation should go to the Linux Foundation, which supports the development of the Linux operating system. All of our team members agree with the choice, because we’ve all used Linux on workstations, laptops, servers, and phones (most of us have Android-based handsets) for years. We would like to thank the foundation for all its work so far, and we hope its future efforts to make Linux ever stronger will continue to be successful.

Our other July donation, according to Viktor, goes to the World Cancer Research Fund, an organization that supports research into how lifestyle, particularly nutrition and physical activity, affects cancer risk. Since its foundation in 1982 it has raised over 100 million dollars to fund scientific research, significantly advancing our knowledge of cancer and cancer prevention.

During our last team meetup, which was held on June 30th, Marcin Tabaka gave a presentation on the Underscore.js library. Marcin did an overview of most of the functions provided by the library and demonstrated their use with numerous examples.

Because the presentation is quite lengthy, we decided to split it into two parts. Today, we’re publishing the first one, which covers functions that work with collections and arrays. The second part will be available in the next couple of days.

It is time for June’s instalment of Sidnet’s support initiative for open source projects and the needy. Angelika Kłopotowska, who joined our team at the beginning of the year, made her first picks in her new role as the person responsible for the selection of donees.

Since joining us, Angelika has acted on our recommendation and started using various new open source software. Consequently, she chose KeePassX, a password management application, for our financial support this month. KeePassX has already been praised by other members of the team in the past and fittingly it also received our support back in February of last year. Once again we congratulate the developers for the successful project and keep our fingers crossed for its further development!

Additionally, we joined forces with the “Mam Marzenie” (“I have a dream”) foundation, and made the dream of 8-year-old Wiktoria come true. She dreamed of her first touchscreen phone – and it had to have a pink casing. Wiktoria, the pink phone you wanted so badly will be in your hands in just a few days. All the best to you and the “Mam Marzenie” foundation!