When implementing a new functionality you have two options: blue or red – quick and dirty or smart and clean. If you chose the first option you create a debt that has to be paid at some point. If you go with the second option it takes longer to implement new features but it makes change easier in the future.

Time is generally a pretty restrictive dimension; all the more so in IT, where every product, regardless of its stage of development, is submitted to this measurement. Moreover, IT developers have divided time into different categories and the resources that are allocated to each project are mainly targeted at increasing time efficiency concerning the development of the product. In this article, I will only talk about the time allocated for the execution of one application during a given session.

Betfair Romania is the biggest software development centre of the British Betfair Group. Its headquarters in Cluj currently counts over 250 employees, specialized in a wide range of programming languages, business analysis, information security and project management. In Cluj, 5 main areas are being developed: Platform Development, e-Commerce, Gaming, Product and Enterprise Data Services.

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We were once again glad to be a part of StartupWeekend Cluj and we would like to congratulate the team of organizers for the clear signs of maturity. All throughout the event I had a clear feeling that everything is on schedule, and you could feel it in the attitude of the attendees. Compared to last year, when there was a clear leap in participant count, this year the same number of attendees managed to pitch 49 ideas, almost as much as the combined amount of the previous editions (2012 + 2013 - 59 pitches).

It is already well-known that the mission assumed by Cluj IT Cluster consists in generating and sustaining a relevant interaction between the software industry, the academic environment and the public institutes, for further developing Cluj as one of the leaders in the IT domain.

Generally speaking, you cannot separate projects from project management. It sounds like a 100% rational process but it is truly an art to handle the iron triangle of Quality, Time, and Cost. Generally speaking, you cannot separate projects from project management. It sounds like a 100% rational process but it is truly an art to handle the iron triangle of Quality, Time, and Cost.

Here’s a common situation nowadays: a large company learns about Agile and decides to adopt “agile processes”. The leadership team creates a transition plan that includes training, coaching and consultancy. They monitor the advance by asking: how many teams are agile? Because when we’ll be over 80%, we’re done transitioning and we’re agile. Right?

In most software projects, except perhaps those of small size, project managers use well known methodologies. These can be represented by dedicated systems - PMBOK (Project Management Body of Knowledge) or PRINCE2 - but they may also be replaced by methodologies specific to a particular organization. Although these approaches have a number of differences regarding orientation and use specific terminology, all have a few key points: the projects are delivered in stages and these stages involve the use of some common project management processes.

Let’s have a quick look over the history and development of the HTTP protocol (Hypertext Transfer Protocol), in order to better understand the modifications proposed for the 2.0 version. HTTP is one of the protocols that have nourished the spectacular evolution of the Internet: it allows the clients to communicate with the servers, which is the base of what the Internet is today.

The most widely used method of logging events for debugging in JavaScript is by calling “console.log(message)” which will show the message in the developer console. To log warnings or errors, developers can also use “console.warn(message)” or “console.error(message)”.

Have you ever had to write code for a lot of highly similar things, differing only in a few details? Have you ever wondered - while copy pasting code from one class to another, and another fifty more - why are you doing this repetitive, error prone and boring task instead of a machine? Machines are just fine doing this kind of work, why aren’t they doing it? In this article we will talk about how one can write a program which generates code based on an xml input file and flexible templates.

These days, when it comes to huge popular websites, performance issues come up often along with the question: „How can we support such a huge userbase at a reasonable price ?”. Facebook, one of the largest websites on the planet, seems to have a pretty good answer to this: the HipHop virtual machine. What is this, how was it born, how does it work and why is it better than the alternatives ? I will try to answer all these questions in the following pages.

In the previous issue, I presented the Restricted Boltzmann Machines, which were introduced by Geoffrey Hinton, a professor at the University of Toronto, in 2006, as a method for speeding up neural network training. In 2007, Yoshua Bengio, professor at the University of Montreal, presented an alternative to RBMs: autoencoders.

In the following lines we will talk about AOP and how we can implement our own AOP stack using .NET Core features. First of all, let us see what AOP means. The acronym comes from Aspect Oriented Programming and it is another programming paradigm with the main goal of increasing the modularity of an application. AOP tries to achieve this goal by allowing separation of cross-cutting concerns.

At a time when market pressure and the need for increased competitiveness in all economic area are becoming increasingly stringent, IT industry has its own particular place and plays a very important role that can make the difference between the companies which are going to be sustainable and successful in the coming decade, by investing in innovation, research, process efficiency and those which are settling for what they are doing at the moment, thus risking to disappear from the market.

Do we have to deal with personal data in our activity? What does this involve? These are legitimate questions for a mobile applications developer, since collecting these data has become an inherent phenomenon of the digital world and a more and more controversial topic along with the evolution of mobile applications, due to the various situations that can arise. Moreover, the subject is of a greater interest since, in the future, a tightening of sanctions is foreshadowed for non-compliance with the legislation of the personal data.

Supposedly the answer is bad requirements. It is risky to take a radical stand and to isolate the determining cause to a single factor, but poorly conducted elicitation is surely one of them. From my experience, during elicitation, even with the best interest at heart, there is neither discrimination nor consideration for the terms requirements / solution design. This results in a cumbersome bundle of mixed information that doesn’t add up into a cohesive, unitary whole.

In large companies, most of the employees go through training when they enter the company, and then they are repeated according to the training needs of the company. Under these circumstances, we might think that the employees no longer see the trainings as something special, but we are wrong. A study carried out by the researchers of the Madeira Spanish University shows us that the employees enjoy training almost as much as a raise. The study conducted on 5000 employees from Spain reveal that the satisfaction regarding the employer and implicitly the workplace increases by 18% after the employee has participated in a training provided by the company.

Codespring team has just returned from the Mobile World Congress 2014, the place where all the mobile magic happens! Samsung, Sony, HTC, LG, Nokia, Huawei revealed their latest devices and innovations. A distinct and exotic appearance was the Yota team from Russia. In the mobile landscape we also remarked the Romanian team from Allview sliding in with its latest devices. Find out more in the following lines.

“Any problems, Gogu?”
Chief stood still in front of Gogu’s desk and he was trying to read the face behind the display. All eyes were focusing on them: for about 10 minutes, only gabbles had been heard from the strategic area entitled “Gogu”, but nobody had had the courage to see what was going on with him, whether someone had made him angry and whom. It was risky to place yourself in front of Gogu’s batter of pungent remarks, and his unintelligible gabble was a clear sign – confirmed in many similar situations – of danger.