Almost 60 years ago, William Shockley left Bell Laboratories and founded the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory in 1956 in Mountain View, believing that silicon, not germanium, is the right material for the production of transistors. In 1957 eight of his engineers left the company and founded Fairchild Semiconductor and later on other two (Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore) founded Intel.

We met Marius Mocian, marius@mocian.com, at Cluj-Napoca Business Days event in July 2012 where we had a booth to show people our product MIRA (www.mirarehab.com). After explaining to Marius what MIRA was all about, he started bringing people to our booth and discussing more about the business side of the product, rather than the technical or medical part which we were used to answering. We immediately saw that he believed in what we were doing, the potential MIRA can bring to physiotherapy and that we needed help in refining our business strategy in order to reach out to investors and transform the product into a business.

I’ll start with Iacob Negruzzi’s closing of his book: “Memories from Junimea”. „When I look back, at the past life of Junimea, I fully convince myself that such a society could have been formed only through the contribution of some utterly special circumstances. A certain number of young men, with a shared vivid love for literature and all intellectual endeavors, had to meet in a country town, away from the political turmoil of the capital. They had to be financially independent, such as to have enough to help other young men that lacked the means, but had the talent and determination.

The Software Craftsmanship movement started in 2009, as a reaction to the idea that we can temporarily reduce the code quality to ship products faster. The promoters of the movement think exactly the opposite: to deliver products in time, even under pressure, we should improve the speed with which a programmer writes quality code. In the first case the users, customers and the company that produces software can suffer; users and customers due to the mistakes introduced in the applications (bugs), and the company due to medium term decrease of the production speed for new application versions and due to user dissatisfaction.

The methodology presented in this article was developed at SEI (Software Engineering Institute, Carnegie Mellon) and is part of the ATAM (Architecture Tradeoff Analysis Method) methodology. The article presents this methodology in a simplified form and stresses its practical application.

The dialogue between client and architect is about as intimate as any conversation you can have, because when you’re talking about building a house, you’re talking about dreams. Robert A. M. Stern Nowadays, application development is not only about module development, software maintenance, which was created many years ago, or the simple functionality testing. The Romanian ‘softists’ have reached the level in which not only the client or „developer” wants more, but the market wants something more from ‘Romanian developers’.

Nowadays everyone talks about the Cloud, how to move IT activities into Cloud, how to gain time and money using advantages offered by the Cloud. So, what exactly is this Cloud and who takes care of it so everything goes fine inside of it? A short definition: “The cloud is a complex mechanism made from a suite of software and hardware services configured based on client needs.” Services offered by the Cloud are split into two main categories: SaaS and IaaS

Facebook, Google or Flickr have the possibility to introduce in production up to 10 new versions of product per day, in a way that is transparent to the users. In the heterogeneous and agile world of the IT industry, the development of applications and services becomes a challenge due to the diversity of technologies and products, as well as due to their number. Likewise, in the big software companies where there are Development, Testing and IT departments involved in the developing process there is the need of close collaboration. To insure efficiency, the collaboration is realized by standard processes and products which, because of the diversity of the processes and products used, becomes an objective that is difficult to attain.

An overview of the social and professional actuality reveals a rather exponential trend, especially in the last twenty years, which makes our today’s standards and benefits higher and higher. Beyond obvious evolution, the dynamics and magnitude of these events have led to take place an important, but yet subtle, change of emphasis positioning: the achievements do matter, but more than that, today, it matters most the further options you have. If there are other areas where this is less true, in IT this conclusion is real and representative.

The requirements imposed by the standards in the field make developing safety-critical software be a continuous challenge for everyone involved in the process. The SCADE development environment prescribes many of these rules right from the beginning of the project. Built on top of a synchronous language, having a deterministic approach, bundled with a certified C code generator and a set of tools to help with testing and verifying the product, SCADE lets us focus on implementing the high level requirements and saves us from worrying about the basic mistakes.

We all heard about trends. We have trends in music, fashion and of course in IT. For 2013 there were announced some trends that are already part of our lives. Who didn’t hear about cloud, machine to machine (M2M) or NoSQL. All these trends have entered in our lives as part of our ordinary day. Big Data is a trend that existed last year and it remained one of the strongest one.

Alan Perlis once said A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing. Judging by the number of Stack Overflow questions and the impressive number of articles and posts on reddit, Slashdot or blogs, it is clear that the Haskell language deserves to be known. In fact, functional programming is indeed a domain which every hacker should be accustomed with.

The book which I submit for review this edition of TSM, entitled „RESTful Web Services Cookbook” by Subbu Allamaraju, Yahoo architect, is part of a special category. This book presents a complete guide to writing and consuming REST web services in a manner independent of programming language. This is a big challenge. Regarding the new concepts introduced, the book is a comprehensive material and the challenge results in finding the limits of a particular programming environment.

A lot of people want a kind of Silicon Valley in Cluj, with innovative and creative companies. IT Cluster aims a similar goal. In a four articles series, Danis Consulting aims to analyse these companies from Human Resources perspective, how they evolved, their problems and, the most important, how they can constitute a real community to be proud about.

Unlike the other articles published in the previous issues, this one will have several parts. The first part offers a definition of performance management and process and the tools used for its implementation. In a dynamic environment in which companies put more and more emphasis on employee development, every organization around the globe tried defining those elements that contribute to the creation of a successful organizational environment.

A lot of people I talked to recently talked about a wish to do something, unfortunately it remains a lot of the time just a wish. We each have a “I wanna work out”, “I want to read more”, “I want to eat healthier”, “I want to wake up earlier” and so on … We really, really wish for those things, we wish to start them, we wish to keep at them, we are really motivated but even so … nothing happens.

Imagine Cup is an annual competition hosted by Microsoft to promote innovation and their technologies. Teams of up to four students, in the timespan of one year, take the challenge of writing an application that would support the Millennium Development Goals. This year however, the theme requirements were removed, giving us the freedom of making a fun game that didn’t have the responsibility of ending world hunger. I postponed participating to Imagine Cup since my first year in university. I used to tell myself “Maybe next year I’ll find a fun idea and hone my skills. I’ll try next year”. But this was the start of my third year, and with only two years until graduation, I didn’t have many „next years” left. I had to do something.

Gogu took - slowly, as usual – the food tray, and started looking for Misu. It took him a few seconds to find him. Dude, this Misu has a very bad habit to always sit in the farthest corner of the dining room; he amused himself while walking towards his colleague. He replied to the greetings and felt somewhat important seeing how many people paused from eating to salute him or to wish him good appetite. After all, I’ve been working for some time now in this firm... He sat satisfied near Misu, smiled at him, and realized instantly the major error he had committed.