I have recently got this question from a web programmer who is going to be in Cluj during the event. Should he attend IT Days given the fact that there is no track dedicated to web technologies? The answer is affirmative. As a specialist in an area, it is relatively easy to understand the other technologies, and IT culture should consist of several areas, not just the one we are currently working with. Actually, most of the presentations are addressed to programmers, no matter their specialty. Thus, we have the following sections: big data, management, software architecture, products, startups and research. Moreover, those from Hands On Lab will make references to concepts, not necessarily to a certain language. The only tracks oriented towards specialists are those of Java and .NET, where it is recommended that the people attending have some knowledge in these areas. Therefore, the conference will be accessible to all the specialists. But what we are wishing for, as organizers, is that every presentation clearly conveys a message, a tendency or a lesson that the participants can learn. Last but not least, IT days can also be an invitation to technical discussions or an opportunity to meet colleagues who work in other companies.
In the following lines, I invite you to read a short presentation of the speakers and the technical subjects of Cluj IT Days, www.itdays.ro, on November 24th -25th.
Peter Lawrey is a special guest, who participates for the second time in the conference. He has a popular blog, Vanilla Java, which has recently reached 4 million views. The open source projects he is working on, OpenHFT, Chronicle-Queue and Chronicle Engine also have now a component oriented towards companies. Peter will also lead, separately, a workshop for advanced Java programmers. His presentation, Work with Hundreads of Hot Terabytes in JVMs, which is also presented these days in the JavaOne conference in San Francisco, proves how terabytes of data can be accessed and how real time updates can be obtained from the SQL data base by using Java language.
Vasile Mihali, a software passionate, especially keen on Java, has worked in cloud distributed projects, using tens of machines and terabytes of data. His presentation, Be Fast, be Off-JVM, be Chronicle-Queue will use the libraries described by Peter in order to prove the optimization of applications and of using the hardware resources through Chronicle-Queue.
Silviu Dumitrescu is an old collaborator of the TSM magazine, who has taught for many years in the university of Oradea, also starting recently a collaboration with companies in Cluj. Having a passion for Java and a trainer certification awarded by Oracle, Silviu will talk about his practical experience with JOOQ in the presentation called: jOOQ - an object oriented abstraction, interacting with relational databases.
Tudor Marghidanu, a software development manager and software architect in Yardi Romania, is a computer passionate, who finds time, in spite of his busy schedule, to express himself through music, too, as he is the drummer in two local bands: Relative and Holy Motors. His presentation in entitled: Evolving ideas with Big Data tools.
Tudor Lapusan, initiator of the Big Data Cluj group, is an admirer of Big Data technologies, especially of Apache Hadoop technologies. His presentation will be on modeling data in Apache Hadoop: Data modeling in Apache Hadoop.
Daniel Sarbe coordinates the Big Data and Machine Translation group within SDL Research Cluj, where he is working on a solution for processing unstructured data, given a volume of the order of petabytes, with the help of Hadoop technologies. Moreover, he is involved as speaker and organizer in the Big Data community. His presentation will be: Machine Learning in the age of Big Data.
Sergiu Damian, software architect, distinguishes himself through a clear understanding of the architecture of systems, practices and processes of software development. His initiative, RABS, enjoys a real success among the specialists, having an active role in the local communities. Within Cluj IT Days, he will talk about synchronizing data in distributed systems, in a presentation entitled: On synchronizing data in distributed applications. The lack of a stable and reusable modality in synchronizing data between the client applications and server represents a problem that is frequently encountered in the modern frameworks and applications. His presentation will debate precisely this problem, offering possible solutions and answers.
Robert Cristian is the manager of the advanced technology group within the Romanian branch of 3Pillar Global. His role is to lead the R&D effort and his areas of interest are software architecture, reactive systems and functional programming. His presentation, What is Reactive Programming and why you should care?, will bring up reactive programming, a fashionable concept in the last years.
Florin Cardasim comes from Iasi and he leads the development team of Endava. Besides his technical knowledge, he is also an active trainer within the local communities. Moreover, he is co-founder of CodeCamp Iasi, one of the largest IT communities in Romania. He will present to us Decisions in Architecture, which will also include study cases that analyze the positive or negative impact of some decisions taken too late or too early.
Radu Vunvulea is an old collaborator of TSM magazine, asserting himself as the writer of the most numerous articles published. Keen on Microsoft technologies, he has received for the fourth consecutive year the Microsoft MVP distinction. This year's presentation, How to manage one million messages per second using Azure, will show us how easy it is to build a solution that can process one million messages per second. The session will begin with a real time demo and will continue with the concepts of building such a system in less than 8 hours, using the Azure services.
Andrei Larionescu, software architect in Yonder, having over 8 years of experience with Microsoft technologies, is fond of technology and always in search of some technical challenges in the current projects. His presentation, Implementing Ports-And-Adapters [in the .NET ecosystem], will show us how we can develop software products without depending on a certain service vendor or on the interruption of an open-source project.
Catalin Pop has more than 12 years of experience in Microsoft technologies. He is very keen on technologies and in time he has introduced new technologies in his projects or on the company level, such as: Entity Framework, WCF, Silverlight, ASP.Net MVC, WF, Rx-Framework and MEF. Furthermore, Catalin is a trainer of SQL Server, Entity Framework, ASP.Net, WPF, WCF, Workflow Foundation and other technologies. His presentation, ASP.Net 5 (vNext) Performance Characteristics, will cover the main features that are going to appear in the next .NET platform.
Dr. Razvan Florian, manager of the Romanian Institute of Science and Technology, is the author of several papers on the third generation of neural networks. Florian has founded two companies, Arxia and Epistemio. His presentation is called Using artificial intelligence for automatizing software development and will show one of the pursuits of his research: the creation of smart systems capable of writing software autonomously.
Dr. Sorin Cotofana comes from Netherlands, from Delft University, where he is an associated professor of the Faculty of Electronics, Mathematics and Computers. He is author and co-author of over 300 works in his field of study. He has received 12 awards for the best piece of writing in international conferences such as: 2012 IEEE Conference on Nanotechnology, 2012 ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Nanoscale Architectures, 2005 IEEE Conference on Nanotechnology, 2001 International Conference on Computer Design. He served as Associate editor for IEEE Transactions on CAS I (2009-2011), IEEE Transactions on Nanotechnology (2008-2014), Chair of the Giga-Nano IEEE CASS Technical Committee (2013-2015), and IEEE Nano Council CASS representative (2013-2014). To these, we may add the quality of HiPEAC member and senior member of IEEE (Circuits and System Society (CASS) and Computer Society). His presentation, entitled Reliable Chip Designs from Low-Powered Unreliable Components, will present his research regarding the building of some processing and storage units starting from unreliable components from the domain of nanotechnology.
Catalin Golban graduated from his Master degree studies in 2008 from the Technical University in Cluj-Napoca, in the Image Processing and Recognition department. Since 2013, he has been leading a research and development group within Bosch, developing assistance systems for drivers, through algorithms of video processing and the development of a software platform. All these are a step forward in regard to autonomous cars. This is actually the subject of his presentation, too: Driver assistance systems and outlook into automated driving, in which he will present the solution for safety and comfort in this domain.
We hope that the topics approached and the professional quality of the speakers have convinced you to participate in Cluj IT Days!
by Axente Paul
by Kovacs Zsolt
