We continue the series of articles on Cluj IT Days with a new invitation. We had a month to fill in the blanks. We thank all those who have sent us a suggestion for presentation and we are sorry we couldn’t include them all. We will try to include them within our next editions. Let’s have a look over the main sections of the event as well as those of the presentations.
The event is scheduled to start at 9:00 with the registration, followed by the opening of the event, when we will also release the book entitled “How to build a product”.
The first section, Trends and Leadership, is meant to inspire and set some of the evolution trends for the local companies. The CEO of Accesa, Iulian Iuga, will present to us the evolution of his company from the beginnings till now, as well as the direction it will follow. An originally entitled presentation, The Black Swan, belongs to Dan Ionescu.
Firefox OS is a novelty on the market of the mobile operating systems, seen as an exotic and different system. Alex Lakatos, representative of Mozilla and QA team lead in Xoomworks, will present its main characteristics to us. We continue after a short break with an analysis of the local IT market from the perspective of Voicu Oprean, CEO Arobs. He will be followed by Bogdan Herea, Pitech Plus CEO, whose presentation will focus on the evolution from outsourcing to products. In fact, the subject of his presentation, often seen as an important trend among the companies in Cluj, will constitute the main theme of the presentations in this section.
We end this first round of presentations with that of Diana Ciorba, who will analyze feminine leadership, especially in the IT area.
After the first break, the series of presentations having the technical area as a theme will be opened by Silviu Dumitrescu, who will present the novelties of Java 8 and Java FX. Peter Lawrey, our special guest to this edition of IT Days, whom I introduced in detail in my previous article, will speak to us about Java Performance and what we can do to improve it in our applications.
We go on with a presentation from the software architecture, belonging to Sergiu Damian, who will talk to us about software Architecture for startups and will explain why it is more difficult to build the next Twitter than a banking platform. Functional languages such as Scala or F# have made the transition from fashion to necessity in the commercial applications. More and more companies are adopting the transition towards them in their projects. Ovidiu Deac, employee of Ullink and software consultant, will detail upon the conditions ensuring this evolution from the perspective of the advantages offered by these languages.
Why do we develop software? This is the question which Adrian Bolboaca, Mozaic Works consultant, will try to answer. We got used to building software, but most of the times we forget the reason why we are doing this. The purpose of the presentation is to show what a quality software product is, how accompany can have an organic growth and how programmers can help their clients and companies to develop quality products. Our next speaker is an UX & interaction designer, trained as a philosopher. His presentation, How can we interactively think about user experience?, has as a subject the UX design which incorporates aspects of the technical domains such as informatics, architecture, graphical design, industrial design on the one hand, and on the other hand it tries to integrate aspects of the liberal arts: cognitive sciences, psychology, anthropology, sociology. Why liberal arts? Because their activity domain is precisely the human being (the user) and his existence (experience). Human sciences are, however, a rather recent invention (150 years at most) compared to the discipline having the same activity object, of which they have developed: philosophy. In respect to the human being and what happens to him, philosophy has an expertise of over 2000 years.
Big Data is still a fashionable subject, and Silvia Rausanu promises to tell us more about this tendency which puts a lot of pressure on the leaders of the business based on online applications, on the IT companies, but also on each developer who wants to keep up with everything that is fashionable. The business world is pressured not only by the alignment to the new technologies, but also by the bigger and bigger quantity of data and by the increase in the number of data sources. There is no success recipe on how one can approach the big data issue, not even from the technical point of view – there are at least 20 NoSQL data bases and innumerable map-reduce executor distributions. But once we acknowledge the importance and the positive impact on business development, the architecture, the storage solution and the algorithmic approach derive much more easily from the functional requirements.
Victor Ionescu’s presentation, A new enterprise user experience of UI5 and SAP Fiory, will prove to us that the applications developed from the perspective of the user lead to a higher productivity and help the enterprise users to become more Agile. These concepts will be put into practice by using SAP methodologies and technologies.
The theme of testing is also approached on the first day of the event, in the second presentation of Alex Lakatos, Testing in the main league, which will describe the testing methods in the big companies such as Facebook.
At the end of the first day, we invite you to a glass of wine and a little bit of socializing.
The evening continues in the building of the old Casino, where our colleagues from the Contemporary Cultural Association invite you to take part, from 18:30, to an event entitled Origins, which will be a real lesson on the history of the Romanians.
Among the changes we have made this year in comparison to the 2013 edition was introducing the Java Performance and Agile & Software Craftmanship workshops on November the 24^th^, scheduled one day before the beginning of the event. The interest shown by the local companies is high. In the case of the Java workshop, we will have Peter Lawrey as a speaker, who is 3^rd^ in Java on Stackoverflow and 2^nd^ in concurrency. Though initially it was not part of the plan, we were asked to even introduce a branding of this workshop.
In the case of the Agile & Software Craftmanship one, the purpose is to improve the manner of reaching performance through a better estimation and planning of the sprints as well as an introduction to coding Kata. The workshop targets the programmers, testers, software architects and managers.
I hope I’ve managed to talk you into participating. The number of participants is limited to approximately 230 people, and registration for the event can be done online. In order for the share of information to be complete, participants will go home with the book called “How to build a product”, where part of the presentations will be detailed.
by Mircea Vădan
