Since our last post on the pandemic, we're over at least the first wave of it here in Hungary, though globally it's spreading faster than ever and there's no real end in sight yet. As an organization largely unaffected in our day to day operation we wanted to help in our local and broader communities where we can. Let's see! We were among the first companies to offer our expertise in remote education and remote work pro bono to the Hungarian education system. It's fantastic to see that a large number of companies did the same for the call of the ICT Association of Hungary, as well as part of the "Digital Collaboration" managed by a government agency. While as a remote-first, distributed team we don't have much of a physical infrastructure we do have an office in the inner city of Budapest that a cleaning lady helps us keep tidy. What Microsoft did with similar workers at their huge campus we did on a tiny scale and kept her paid throughout us working fully remotely and the office being closed. If it goes well for us then it should also go well for everyone working with us too. We ramped up our open-source activities a lot. Open-source is the backbone of IT and without IT there can't be an economy, especially not if everybody is social distancing. Contributing to open-source makes everyone benefit, not just in the times of a pandemic. And finally, we've delivered 1000 reusable, washable textile face masks to the Hungarian Charity Service of the Order of Malta by joining forces with the artisan clothing small business Borsika Portéka (they provided the masks on cost price that we paid for). The Malteses are a 1000-year old, global charity organization and one of the strongest, most impactful ones in Hungary: They have thousands of employees and volunteers operating hospitals, retirement homes, schools, and being on the field in disadvantaged communities all across Hungary. These masks will be used by senior residents of retirement homes, who are at the most risk, and by children in schools of the Malteses. Our contributions to the Maltesers' activities certainly won't stop here. And our team members all got similar masks too, they're pretty fashionable :). Our team, thankfully, stays completely healthy and to our knowledge, none of us got infected. Keep staying safe, everyone! Update on 24.07.2020: We've similarly delivered a second batch of 1000 masks to the Malteses. Most of these will be used in three retirement homes: One in Budapest, one in the nearby town Páty, and one in the town of Pestszentlőrinc (the pages are mostly in Hungarian but you can check out pictures). Update on 03.09.2020: And the third 1000 masks delivered! But we don't have a picture of this occasion, unfortunately :(. Update on 06.02.2021: Another 400 masks delivered. What makes it special this time is that these bear the logo of the Malteses! Update on 12.04.2021: Another 400 masks are there at the Malteses now. Sorry, no pictures this time. Update on 05.08.2021: And another 400 masks were delivered, branded with the Maltese cross but this time in blue: Update on 07.02.2022: Another 600 masks delivered!

The GPU Day conference, organized by our partner, the Wigner Research Centre for Physics of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, is a now traditional HPC and parallel computing conference in Budapest, Hungary. After last year our Hastlayer project will again be a featured topic on 22-23 June. If you haven't heard, Hastlayer is the magic that can turn your .NET software into hardware, so your program is now substituted by a (faster and less power consuming) computer chip! Not just that, but this year's conference is also sponsored by Lombiq. Thus the conference now has a proper website and sessions will also be recorded. So if you can't attend make sure to check back to the conference website later to watch the recordings!

Here at Lombiq sometimes we "give back" not just to open source projects, but also to local communities of ours. In the town of Solymár, Hungary an initiative was started that we could support: Fészek Waldorf School together with Parthus Sport Association wanted to build a new gymnasium, which would not only serve the school's pupils but also the town's 10 000 residents. An overview of the new complex at Solymár, including the new school building (left) and gymnasium (right). Image courtesy of Parthus Association. The Waldorf education puts an emphasis on kids being physically active as well, so it's quite an issue that the school lacks a proper gym. Soon this will change however, since in February 2018 the new gymnasium will be opened. The foundation stone of the building was laid down, together with a time capsule on the beautiful spring day of 4th May, with us taking part on the ceremony too. But how come that Lombiq, a technology company has anything to do with a new gym? Well, in Hungary companies can, within strict rules, decide to support local initiatives with part of their corporation tax. Since we pay quite some of that we figured it's time to choose a project we'd like to see succeed: This was the new gymnasium of Solymár. The gym won't just stand alone: It's part of a bigger decade-long real estate development that revitalises the area of a long closed brick factory, connecting the once industrial part of the town back to the residents' daily life. Fun fact: "fészek" means "nest" in Hungarian, so I guess we could open a software development school called DotNest too? The foundation stone laying ceremony with a crowd mostly consisting of pupils and parents.

It's called Lombiq Technologie_s_ for a reason: While day to day we are deep in Orchard CMS development we also strive to build our R&D bigger and bigger. Now Lombiq just got closer to the world of science! As facilitated by Gergely Gábor Barnaföldi, the group leader of the Wigner GPU Lab on December 2, 2016 together with Péter Lévai, Director-General of the Hungarian Wigner Research Centre for Physics we signed a partnership agreement, formalizing months of brainstorming around possible ways of cooperation. Wigner, being one of the biggest research institute in the region, from now on connects us to the natural science community. Those guys are not joking: Among others they also work with CERN, providing the second-biggest datacenter that crunches numbers for the Large Hadron Collider. You know, the one that's famous for not admitting they can create black holes not creating black holes. This partnership will allow us to begin fruitful joint projects, allowing us to help further science a bit. Our first collaborative efforts will be around Hastlayer, the tool that converts .NET software into specialized hardware, making it a lot faster and consume a lot less power: We'll test Hastlayer with highly parallelized computations of scientific models. We'll see what kind of results will come out, but exciting times ahead!

Following the first Orchard university subject and the first open Orchard online course, Dojo Course, this year we continue with the first online university subject about Orchard. Óbuda University rolled out many online subjects this semester (to add to the list of "first"-s, this was also the first time the university started courses that were strictly just online courses, without any classroom attendance), one of them being ours: "ASP.NET MVC web application development using the Orchard content management framework" (which wins the award for the subject with the longest name too!). This is an exciting opportunity to test how well students can learn by just watching the tutorials, reading the supplied supporting materials and practising themselves. The project ideas we got submitted this far look very promising!

Our second Orchard university course finished - but this time it was also a massive online course. With the free and open Dojo Course we reached more people than we ever could with an on-site course. You can read the full case study for the Orchard Dojo Course and the Orchard university course on our Orchard training website Orchard Dojo.

In the spring semester of 2013 we started the world-first university course on Orchard at Óbuda University. The students were guided through the usage of Orchard as well as the basics of theme and module development and in the end presented their project work created with what they've learned. You can read the full case study for the first Orchard university course on our Orchard training website Orchard Dojo.