Four years ago, in the month of February, we launched Today Software Magazine, together with a group of friends. Today, we are pleased to have become a reference in the domain, with over 700 articles available in Romanian and English and almost 400 different authors. We hereby thank our collaborators, our readers for the increased interest and the companies which support this project: Gemini Solutions, ISDC, 3Pillar Global, Endava, Fortech, Accesa, Betfair, Yardi, Accenture, Telenav, Mozaic Works, VE Interactive, Siemens, Colors in projects. We promise you to keep up the good work and continue to invest the same passion!
The passion you need to have or don't need to have if you are a programmer represented an interesting topic of discussion in the release event of January. Inevitably, we ended up taking sides for or against one point of view, but we also got some balanced perspectives. Being a programmer just to ensure reasonable incomes and not necessarily out of passion is a way to relate to a profession which many people think justified in a society in permanent crises, such as ours. My point of view is in favor of passion. I do believe the income is an important factor, but it should not define a way of personal development. As arguments to support my point of view, there are different articles on motivational topics published in TSM. With no passion for programming, without the joy of discovering solutions to problems or that of applying the latest technologies, it is hard to continue in a very competitive environment. Personally, after a few years of activity that focused mostly on management and entrepreneurship, I had the opportunity of coming back to programming. It is a pleasure that one can hardly compare to any other activity, and the satisfaction is equal. I therefore advise you to do what you like doing and ask yourselves at the end of the day if that is what you truly enjoy.
The main theme of this issue is testing, as revealed in the series of articles dedicated to it: Harmony in Cross-Browser Testing, The testing of web services using SOAP UI, The Testing Map and Challenges in Dev/Test/DevOps scenarios and how Microsoft Azure can help us. We continue with Chaos, memes and software design patterns, an interesting article on Memetics, a science on the propagation of ideas and their influence on us. Using machine learning to improve business shows the possible positive impact of using big data technologies in business analysis. Next, there is an assessment of the present CRMs (Customer Relationship Management): From business to implementation. How do we choose the CRM? Creating a Microsoft Band Tile to push the build state notifications presents a solution of notifying the software development team on the fact that an integration test has failed, directly on the Microsoft Band 2 device. We round this issue up with two articles from the accountancy area, a domain which seems to enjoy a high interest from the readers: How to calculate the salary in 2016 and What does the Romanian state prepare for the IT&C area? We end this issue with a new appearance of the comic character who brings new interesting information from the area of project management: Gogu!
Enjoy your reading !!!
by Ariel Pontes
by Cristina Juc , Tudor Bîrlea
