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The middle of the month is, traditionally, a time when we send financial support to open source projects and charity organizations. This time, the lucky member of our team responsible for the selection of a project and organization to support was Krzysiek.

Krzysiek chose to help out Vim, the programmer’s editor with more than 20 years of history and a cult following (with Krzysiek being one of the devoted fans). Actually, Bram Moolenaar, the author and maintainer of Vim, no longer uses the donated money for the project, and instead passes it on to the ICCF Holland organization, who helps children in Uganda – so we’re indirectly donating to that cause (and very happily so).

The second organization that we’re supporting this month is the Polish Association for People with Mental Handicap in Zgierz, Krzysiek’s home town. They have been in operation for more than 20 years (like Vim!), providing help and care for people with mental disabilities.

We send our thanks and best wishes to the developers of Vim, to ICCF Holland, and to the Association!

Our initiative of regularly supporting open source projects and charity organizations celebrates its first birthday today. We started it last year in May with donations to the FreeBSD Foundation and “Przystan Ocalenie”.

The game goes on and with this very post, we are stepping into the second year. In this anniversary month, the honor of selecting the project and organization to support was given to Krzysiek Skarbek, our newest team member, working in the new office in Lodz.

The open source project that we’re donating to is Debian, one of the most popular and solid Linux distributions, with an impressive history of almost 20 years. Krzysiek is a devoted fan of Debian, so his choice was no surprise. We send our greetings and congratulations to the Debian project team and wish them all the best in the future.

We are also making a donation to the “Jokot” Foundation in Warsaw, devoted to helping homeless and abandoned animals. This choice wasn’t made by chance either – some time ago, Krzysiek has adopted two kittens rescued by the Foundation and has got to know the volunteers quite well. The kittens have since then grown into big healthy cats (pictured below).

Best wishes to all the volunteers of the “Jokot” Foundation and all the animals under their care!

It’s time for the April 2013 edition of our monthly donations. This month we’re supporting yet another project that has long deserved it, since we’ve been using it for years. Actually, you are looking at it right now, as it’s the content management system that our website is built on: Drupal.

Drupal is one of the most successful CMSes on the market, it has been around for more than twelve years, and is reportedly powering about two percent of all websites worldwide. We are supporting Drupal by purchasing a year of membership in the Drupal Association, as an organization member.

In addition to supporting Drupal, we are sending a donation to the “Little Claw” Foundation in Warsaw, who helps homeless cats by providing food, sterilizing them, and most importantly finding them new homes

Marcinek, one of the Foundation’s cats, waiting for a new home

To all the volunteers of the “Little Claw” Foundation, thank you for your efforts!

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!