Do you still remember the homework we received as students, where we were asked to describe the city of the future? How many of the wonders we used to dream can you spot around you in the contemporary urban space? The examples are not few. My childhood phantasy city is now a smart city, a concept that is gaining ground, a project city officials want to invest in. Smart cities have a low level of pollution; they have solar panels and parking spots that we can easily find with an app, cities with IT systems that eliminate queues ... Cluj tries and wishes to become a fully-fledged smart city as soon as possible. If we look at the startups that deal with the smart city concept and IOT, we notice that these were created in response to citizens' needs. We already have startups which have solved the problem of bureaucracy, parking, and medical appointments. These are only some examples which offered solutions to serious problems. Many projects are 2-3 years ahead of the market, a state of reality which enables us to plan and integrate the systems quite well. More details can be found in the startup section dedicated to this issue. I am also throwing the following question out there: What would you like to see in your city ?
This year, Today Software Magazine celebrates 5 years since its first issue. We are happy to support people's passion for development and we promise to bring even more new things to your attention. As such, we have recently launched an annual subscription to the PDF version of the magazine. Moreover, you will be able to have access to all the papers, starting with day one, given that the papers are published on our website over the course of a month. We were surprised by the great number of subscriptions we have had so far and we plan to provide exclusive content in the future as well.
We published two interviews in this issue: How have I become an Agile professional?, an interview with Venkat Subramaniam, speaker, Java specialist, consultant, professor at Huston University. The second interview highlights ......who offered technical support in bringing to life a cultural project, I want a Dacian in Bucharest. To define the requirements of a successful market product, you must know how to analyze your customers' wishes and you must be able to test a product as early as possible. This topic is tackled in The seven deadly sins of your product: Imprudence of Greed. Keeping up with the same topic from a development point of view, we invite you to read: Transformarea digitală cu ajutorul Sistemelor Embedded. If you are curious about how startups build their prototypes, have a look at Rapid prototyping with RubyOnRails. Innovation is a complex topic. The paper called Design Concept - folosirea procesului de design pentru inovație suggests a series a steps that can be taken to transform a concept into something real. Serverless processing is discussed in: Serverless Architecture and Serverless computing using Azure Functions. Last, we invite you to try a coworking space by reading about it in Coworking and Romania.
by Lőrinc Pap
by Ovidiu Mățan
