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Yesterday was the second anniversary of our monthly donations to open source projects and charity organizations. We started the initiative on May 15th, 2012, and have continued it uninterruptedly since then.

Over the two years, we have supported many open source projects, mostly related to what we do – software that we use in everyday work or for specific projects. This is our way of expressing gratitude to the software creators for all the effort that they put in.

The world doesn’t revolve around open source software, though, and with that in mind we also made donations to many charity organizations and others in need. In some cases, this lead to even more opportunities for us to be helpful, like with the “little brothers of the Poor” Association, for whom we developed a web application to send seasonal greeting e-cards, promoting their activities.

Today, in celebration of the anniversary, we’re sending donations to two recipients of special significance – one is an open source project that is indispensable for our team, the other one is a charity organization that was the first that we ever donated to, back in May 2012.

That open source software is the web project management system Redmine, which we already supported in 2012, and which got some well deserved praise on our blog in the past. Nothing’s changed in this regard, we continue to be devoted users of Redmine and we can’t imagine working without it.

The aforementioned charity organization is “Przystan Ocalenie”, an animal rescue centre that helps and provides shelter for animals that suffered from human cruelty.

And so we begin the third year of the initiative – see you around for the next round!

It’s the middle of April, which means it’s time for another round of our monthly donations to open source projects and charity organizations. This month’s recipients have been selected by Piotr.

The software project that we’re making a donation to is GIMP, the popular multi platform graphics editor. It was first released in 1996, and over the years has come a long way, leading to wide adoption among amateur artists, and even earning some acceptance in the professional market dominated by Adobe Photoshop. In our team, we’re all developers and as such are genetically preconditioned to cringe at the thought of doing any kind of graphics design work, but if we end up being forced to do that, we usually use GIMP.

Oh, and GIMP also happens to be the tool that we use to edit the images in our blog posts (like its own logo above). Thanks to all the people involved in the project, keep up the good work!

The second donation that we’re making this month is to the “Rescue Children with Cancer” Foundation, established in May of 1991, with the mission to support child patients of the Clinic of Paediatric Bone Marrow Transplantation, Oncology and Hematology at the Wroclaw Medical University.

It’s donations time! For the third time this year, we’re doing the monthly donations to open source projects and other good causes. The honor of selecting the project and organization to support has been given to Karol Janyst.

Being a devoted user of the Eclipse IDE, Karol chose it to be the project that we’re donating to this month. More precisely, the donation goes to the Eclipse Foundation, which supports the development of the Eclipse IDE software. The Foundation also runs a lot of other projects, mostly related to the IDE and extending its features. Thanks and congratulations to the Foundation for all that they have done for the development of open source programming tools, and all the best in the future!

As always, we’re also sending a donation to an organization that carries out charitable work, and this month it’s the Children’s Fantasy Foundation, founded in 2003 and dedicated to bringing a bit of happiness into the lives of terminally ill children by making their wishes and dreams come true. The wishes can be as small as a new toy, or as big as a trip to Disneyland. We are happy to contribute to the Foundation’s efforts and hope our donation will help bring a smile to a child’s face.

It’s high time for this month’s donations to open source projects and charities (we’re actually a bit late, since we traditionally do these on the 15th day of the month). Krzysztof Pisera had the privilege of selecting the project and organization to support.

The open source project selected by Krzysztof is KeePassX – an application that securely stores and manages passwords. In this day and age, when every Internet user has tens and hundreds of accounts/profiles on numerous websites, a tool like this is indispensable. KeePassX is used by a number of guys in our team, both on Linux and Mac OS X (there’s also a version for Windows – the program is truly multiplatform), and we all like it a lot. Hats off to the developers for a job well done!

We’re also making a donation to the “Paka dla bezdomniaka” (which can be loosely translated as “a gift to a homeless animal”) initiative, which was established to collect funds to feed the animals living in the shelter in Korabiewice. Among them are not only dogs and cats, but also horses, goats, and even bears. Many thanks to the caretakers of the animals in the shelter, and to the organizers of the campaign for their hard work!

Slightly more than a week ago, on January 9th, the Łódź Java User Group organized yet another screening of Uncle Bob’s video presentation. As usual, members of our team have attended the meetup, but this time our company was also sponsoring the video license (as we planned a few months back).

Before the presentation started, we had the opportunity to say a few introductory words about the company and what we do, and to treat the audience with delicious fudge candies wrapped with our logo.

The audience appreciated both the introduction (as evidenced by a series of insightful questions) and the candies (as evidenced by how quickly those were gone). Hopefully, we sparked the interest of some of the attendees and encouraged them to visit our website to learn more.

This episode of the series was an introduction to the so-called S.O.L.I.D. principles (Single responsibility, Open-closed, Liskov substitution, Interface segregation, Dependency inversion), which are an invention of Uncle Bob himself. Their purpose is to help programmers build systems that are easy to maintain and extend in the long run. Upcoming videos will explain each of those principles one by one.

To be honest, this episode seemed slightly less informative to me, when compared to the previous ones. Most of the material was presented in broad terms, with little practical details. On the other hand, this might have been the intention, and more specifics will come up in the subsequent videos. I’m sure soon we’ll have the chance to find out.

Here we come with a double announcement – firstly, it’s time for another round of donations to open source projects and charities, and secondly, it’s the first blog post since we rolled out a new design of our website, along with a revised logotype (and we hope you like it!).

This month, the recipients of our donations have been selected by Marcin Tabaka, and the open source project that he chose is a jQuery plugin called Tablesorter. While most of the time we donate to medium and large scale projects, the smaller ones like this plugin also deserve attention every now and then, as they can be just as useful in our job – like Tablesorter has proven to be for Marcin. The plugin, as its name suggests, allows web developers to easily add sorting features to HTML tables.

We are also sending financial help for Stas Kowaluk, a three-month-old baby boy who is suffering from arm paresis caused by birth complications. Stas is under the care of the Brachial Plexus Foundation, which helps people (both children and adults) with brachial plexus injuries. The Foundation and Stas’ parents are collecting money for his surgery and further treatment – we are happy to contribute to this cause.

We wish you all the best, Stas!

It’s the 15th day of the month, which means it’s time for our monthly donations. The organizations that we’re supporting this time have been selected by Grzegorz Błach.

Since Grzegorz is involved in the FreeBSD project, it was only natural for him to choose to donate to the FreeBSD Foundation, which is the organization behind that project (and which we already supported back when we were just starting this initiative of regular donations). We have been using FreeBSD on our company servers all through the nine years we’ve been in operation, and will happily continue to do so.

The second organization that we’re supporting this month is the “Panopticon” Foundation, which was formed in 2009 and is devoted to the protection of human rights in this age of rapidly developing technology. This is an excerpt from their mission statement:

Our mission is to protect human rights, in particular the right to privacy, in the clash with modern technology used for surveillance purposes. We want to analyse the risks associated with the operation of modern surveillance systems, monitor the actions of both public and private entities in this and intervene when human rights or democratic values are threatened.

We wish both the FreeBSD Foundation and the “Panopticon” Foundation all the best in their efforts.

It has been more than a month since our last post about the screenings of Uncle Bob’s video presentations (organized by the Łódź Java User Group) that we’ve been happily attending. During this time, we had the opportunity to watch two more episodes in the series.

The first of these episodes continued on the topic of Test-Driven Development (introduced in the previous episode) and Uncle Bob’s approach to it. He addressed a number of arguments against TDD – I won’t go into the details, let me just say that Uncle’s counter-arguments were very convincing. In addition to that, a complete example of a bowling game program written with TDD was presented (this example seems to be quite popular as a demonstration of TDD).

Our team is currently participating in one project that makes extensive use of TDD techniques. For me personally, watching Uncle Bob’s videos on this subject was a good learning experience. Of course, this won’t transform you into a TDD expert overnight – there’s a ton of things to learn about writing tests, and even more about writing good tests, but I’d definitely recommend the videos as a starting point.

The next episode in the series was devoted to the concept of software architecture, and the myths around it.

Uncle Bob presented his philosophy that software architecture is not about the selection of the right tools (e.g. an IDE), solutions (e.g. a specific DBMS), or technologies (e.g. an application framework). According to him, it’s all about the use cases (or, if you prefer, user stories) and having a good understanding of the purpose of the software that is being built.

Expanding on that idea, the source code of the software should clearly represent what it’s for. A programmer should be able to quickly identify that he’s looking at, e.g., a payroll application, rather than noticing that it uses the MVC pattern or is built upon a particular framework.

Uncle Bob believes that programmers and software architects should learn to decouple the layers of the system as much as possible, and be able to defer the decision of which framework/database to use until later in the project. The system ought to be designed in a way that allows for easy replacement of these components.

One point brought up in the video that I considered crucial was that software architects should also actually write program code. Understanding the business needs of a client is not enough to be able to design a robust software system. I think the most desired skill for a good software architect is the ability to work with both the business perspective and the technology perspective in mind.

To be honest, the overall ideology of software architecture presented by Uncle Bob seemed a bit demagogue-ish to me, but I guess that’s often the case with areas where business needs and technology overlap. If you are a programmer whose job is simply implementing parts of the system according to the provided specs, then the philosophical lecture on software architecture won’t be of much use to you, and you can probably skip this episode of the series.

We have managed to survive last month’s health crisis and are thus able to get to yet another round of our initiative of supporting open source projects and charities.

This month we are supporting Modernizr, a small library written in Javascript which detects native implementations of HTML5 and CSS3 features in web browsers. It allows us to benefit from newest technologies in our projects, while still being able to support older browsers by utilizing additional libraries and scripts that simulate new features for them.

The charity organization that we support this month is the “Brave Mother” Foundation, based in Jabłonna, a village just north of Warsaw. Since its founding three years ago, the Foundation focuses on helping mothers of children with disabilities. We wish the four founders further successes in their own struggles as well as in providing help for others in need.