Maybe more than in other domains, what matters in IT most is to have a clear vision on the manner in which your project lives its existence, by totally proving its sense and utility. Though my statement seems a little sententious, it starts from an ordinary personal experience: turning the central heating on. I don't know if you are aware of this, but in order to turn a heating station on, it is enough to connect two wires. Basically, any thermostat starts a circuit when the temperature goes under X degrees and stops it when it reaches Y + delta.
It is so easy that a child could program this in pseudo code, and it wouldn't take more than 1-2 hours for a programmer to make such a functional circuit with an Arduino. The common heating station is only one of the examples of successful products which prove just how much the vision matters. Now, think about Nest, which is the best thermoregulator, according to charts and reviews, the company being bought for 3.2 billion dollars by Google at the beginning of 2014.
Their product does the same basic things, in a smarter way and with a few more sensors; the company is still seen as a leader in respect to innovation. Asking ourselves, just like in school, what it is that we can learn from these examples, the correct answer would be that vision is what most matters, before all the requirements and technical conditionings.
We are hereby inviting you to read the articles of this edition, which has reached the round figure 40, having published since February 2012 over 700 articles, most of them written by programmers from Romania. Among the technical articles of this issue, The Taming of the Elephant - How Hadoop Works invites you to an introduction to what Apache Hadoop functioning means. In Connected Home - Challenges in the Area and What is Next, you can learn about the main trends in regard to a Smart House.
Taking Responsive Website to the Next Level proposes the changing of the paradigm through which an user adapts to a website, having, instead, the website adapt automatically to the user's preferences. The article Joe.PHP7 - Looking towards the Future presents the main features of the next version of the popular PHP language. We are also publishing, from Peter Lawrey, our main guest to Cluj IT Days 2015, a new article for advanced Java programmers on optimizing the hashing strategy: An introduction to optimizing a hashing strategy. Given the fact that the theft of data represents a real problem especially for the software companies, the article called Data Security in the Era of Cloud Computing makes a merit of proposing a solution to this problem. We conclude by a useful article on licenses: Briefly, on licenses in the IT&C industry.