Category Archives: Uncategorized

It’s time for another round of monthly donations to open source projects and charity organizations. This month, we once again invited Marcin Tabaka of Internet Tea Group, who works with our team on a regular basis, to select the recipients of our support.

Marcin chose jQuery Validation, a form validation plugin for the extremely popular jQuery library (which we also supported some time ago). We have been using it happily in many web projects and we like it a lot for its flexibility and ease of use. Thanks to the author, Jörn Zaefferer, for a great piece of software.

We’re also making a donation to the Foundation for Children “Help on Time”, specifically we’re supporting one of the children under their care – four year old Jakub Ułanowicz, who suffers from autism and needs financial help to cover the costs of his therapy and rehabilitation.

We send our warmest greetings and best wishes to Jakub and his parents, and we hope our donation will help them at least a little bit.

Today is the day when we do our monthly donations. This month’s selections of an open source project and charity organization to support have been made by Arek.

The supported open source project chosen by Arek is JSLint. It’s a software utility that automatically checks JavaScript code against a set of rules and best practices, created by Douglas Crockford (a programmer well-known for his involvement in the development of JavaScript, including, among other things, the popularization of the JSON data format). For the past couple of months, Arek has been working on a large project based on Backbone.js, and he uses JSLint on a regular basis to verify the quality of his code.

The second of this month’s donations goes to the “Our Children” Foundation, based in Warsaw, devoted to supporting children brought up in children’s homes, specifically the Children’s Home no. 9 in Warsaw.

By the way, “Our Children” is our (rather loose) translation of the Polish name of the Foundation, which is an untranslatable play on words, having a double meaning of “Children’s moms” and “We have children”.

The first blog post of 2013 opens a new year for our initiative of regularly supporting open source projects and charity organizations. This time the honorable task of selecting the organizations to support was given to Piotr.

This month we’re supporting the Perl Foundation, an organization dedicated to promoting and advancing the Perl programming language. A few years back Perl was widely used in web development, nowadays it’s not that much popular, but our team has been using it on a regular basis with many projects. Piotr, before joining us two months ago, had little experience with Perl, but caught up quickly and apparently liked the language, since his choice for the organization to support this month is the Perl Foundation.

We are also sending financial support for a puppy named Franio, currently under the care of the “Unwanted and Forgotten” Foundation in Łódź. A couple weeks back, Franio was found by a group of children in a residental district in Łódź, scared and cold. The Foundation is colleciting funds for the costly treatment of dermatophytosis that Franio is suffering from.

Best wishes to the Perl Foundation, and to all the people who are taking care of Franio (and to Franio himself, of course).

We’re one day late with this month’s donations, since we normally do them on the 15th of every month, but that’s no big deal – 16th is good too. The project and organization to support this month have been selected by Karol.

The open source project that our donation goes to is Marionette, an application library for Backbone.js. Some of the guys on our team (Karol and Arek, to be specific) have been recently involved in a project that uses Marionette, and they liked working with it, so per their recommendation, we’re now giving back to the creators of the library. Thanks guys, and congratulations on a great project!

We are also supporting the Foundation of the Dog Angel Asylum, which runs an animal shelter in Warsaw. With our donation, we’re helping fund the rehabilitation of one of their dogs, named Słonik (which is Polish for “little elephant”, sadly we don’t know the backstory behind this name). Słonik had major health problems, has undergone two operations, and still has a long and expensive recovery ahead of him. Get well soon, Słonik!

We all here are big fans of Git and GitHub, and we happily use one and the other, both for work and for personal projects of ours. Some time ago, we also made ourselves a company profile on GitHub, but we weren’t using it and it was only collecting dust. Now, that’s about to change, as we’re putting into action our long standing plan to contribute to the world of open source software by releasing a few of our internally developed projects – on GitHub.

To start it off, we’re releasing WebService::SendGrid::Newsletter, a Perl module that lets you use the newsletter API provided by SendGrid, a cloud based email delivery service. We developed it as part of our work on a social-ish website that sends out a large number of e-mail notifications and utilizes SendGrid for this purpose. Some parts of the website’s backend are built with Perl, including the notification sending code, and we needed to make it work with SendGrid – and since there was no Perl module that did it, we wrote one.

The version that we’re releasing is in an early stage of development, lacking some features and documentation, but we’ll try to fix that soon. And, of course, as with any project on GitHub, we’re looking forward to contributions and pull requests.

We have a couple more projects lined up to be released, so stay tuned. And may the source be with you.

It’s the 15th day of the month, so in keeping with the tradition that we started half a year back, it’s time for our donations to open source projects and other good causes. This month’s project and charity organization have been chosen by Krzysiek.

The open source project that we support this time is of special significance to us, since we’ve been using it for years in our work and we couldn’t now imagine living without it. It’s the project management application Redmine, and we already covered it on our blog a while ago, praising its great features. Nothing’s changed since then and we’re still using Redmine every day for all of our projects. Thanks and best wishes to Jean-Philippe Lang, the creator of Redmine, and to all the people involved in the project!

The second donation that we make this month is to the Animal Shelter in Łódź. To all the employees and volunteers of the shelter – thank you for your work for the good of animals that need love and care.

The middle of the month is, as usual, the time when we send our donations to open source projects and charity organizations.

This month, we planned to support the Sphinx Search project, an open source seach engine that we recently used  when we were developing a new version of the food blog aggregator site ZPierwszegoTloczenia.pl. However, it turned out the developers of Sphinx do not accept donations, but they suggested we could help the project by purchasing the book “Introduction to Search with Sphinx”, published by O’Reilly.

We did as they suggested and bought a copy of the book for our team, and a couple more to give away to other web developers that we know who might be interested in the subject.

As always, besides supporting an open source project, we’re also making a donation to a charity organization. This month we’re donating to the Animal Shelter in Pabianice, more specifically – we’re virtually adopting one of their dogs, a small fellow by the name of Kiwi. Stay strong, Kiwi!

Today, as we do every month, we send our donations to a selected open source project and a charity organization.

This time the choice of project and organization to support was made by Marcin Tabaka. Marcin is not a member of our core team (he runs his own web development company Internet Tea Group), but he has been working with us on numerous projects in the last few years, and since the cooperation has always been great, we invited him to take part in this little initiative of ours.

Per Marcin’s choice, the open source project that we support this month is Git, the distributed version control system. Our team has been using it as the default version control system for the last few years. We used mostly Subversion in the past, but ever since we started working with Git and got to know its advantages, we’ve been using it for all of our new projects.

We’re also making a donation to the Patient Aid Association for Sarcoma, an organization devoted to supporting the treatment of tumor diseases, including sarcoma. Marcin has been helping the Association for more than a year (among other things, his company developed a new website for the Association) and he praises it as an effective organization that truly helps the patients. We are happy to give them this little bit of support.

It’s time for our monthly donations to open source projects and charity organizations. This month the project and organization to support have been selected by Arek (who is currently enjoying a week of vacation – greetings from the rest of the team, we’re expecting a postcard!).

The first of this month’s donations goes to the jQuery Foundation, which provides support for the jQuery library project. This choice is hardly surprising, as in the past couple of years we haven’t developed a single website or web application that would not use jQuery.

Our second donation is to the “little brothers of the Poor” Association, committed to helping elderly people and relieving isolation and loneliness among the elderly. The Association is a member of the International Federation of little brothers of the Poor, and has been active in Poland since 2002.

We send our best wishes to the developers of jQuery and the jQuery Foundation, and to all the members and volunteers of the “little brothers of the Poor” Association.

In keeping with our tradition, 15th of every month is the day we make donations to open source projects and other good causes. This time the receivers of our donations have been selected by Karol.

The open source project that we are supporting this month is Kohana, a PHP web framework for building applications in the MVC pattern. This was a natural choice for Karol, who is a contributor to the Kohana project and an avid advocate of it.

We also send a donation to “Pies na zakręcie” (literally translated as “Dog on a bend in the road”), which is a group of volunteers that help homeless animals, belonging to the “Asylum of the Canine Angel” Foundation.

Greetings and best wishes to the Kohana project team and the volunteers of “Pies na zakręcie”!