Marius Mornea

We were once again glad to be a part of StartupWeekend Cluj and we would like to congratulate the team of organizers for the clear signs of maturity. All throughout the event I had a clear feeling that everything is on schedule, and you could feel it in the attitude of the attendees. Compared to last year, when there was a clear leap in participant count, this year the same number of attendees managed to pitch 49 ideas, almost as much as the combined amount of the previous editions (2012 + 2013 - 59 pitches).

The annual conference organized by RTC (Romanian Testing Community) has grown, since the previous edition, in what matters most: content. From three to ten speakers, from one day with three sessions to two days, the first with two parallel four session tracks, and the second dedicated to two workshops held by Paul Gerrard and Andy Harding. This year the same number of participants have received five times more content. But the exchange on information was not limited to the scheduled talks. The strong point of the conference was the warm atmosphere and the speakers’ interactivity. Each break was filled with open discussions, most of them evolving in long private sessions that stretched to the next break.

I have chosen two historical figures, in an attempt to offer a solution to one of the current challenges with Cluj IT: the big gap between the high demand and low offering of human resources. Starting with Henry Ford, the man responsible for the invention of the assembly line, but also a few revolutionary HR policies for their time. Like any business owner, he first tried to boost productivity by improving the manufacturing process. In a relatively new industry (Ford started his company in 1906, 17 years after Karl Benz patented his engine), through the invention of the mobile assembly line and the concept of mass production, Ford optimized the manufacturing time of one automobile from 12 and a half hour to just one hour and 33 minutes.

For this article I’ve picked a series of numbers: 1957, 7400, 196/17, 27/100000000. They describe the path from the inauguration of the first ITC institution till the auto-organization of the current community into a guild. In short, I will refer to the historical context, the evolution and the current stage.

I’ll start with Iacob Negruzzi’s closing of his book: “Memories from Junimea”. „When I look back, at the past life of Junimea, I fully convince myself that such a society could have been formed only through the contribution of some utterly special circumstances. A certain number of young men, with a shared vivid love for literature and all intellectual endeavors, had to meet in a country town, away from the political turmoil of the capital. They had to be financially independent, such as to have enough to help other young men that lacked the means, but had the talent and determination.

The topic of this issue is straightforward. We want to build a common timeline for as many IT companies as possible in Cluj. We started with the idea of creating a list to populate the IT map (from the previous issue), using varied and unstructured sources, without attempting to comprehensively explore the business environment. For example, the IT Cluster members’ list, ARIES, the companies present at JobShop, the BestJobs ads, the LinkedIn contacts, the business cards stacked on the desk, etc.

An important question for any story is how it all started? Unfortunately, it rarely can be answered punctually and precisely because history tends to be rather a continuous flow of events and influences, of subjective perspectives and smaller and parallel stories. For the IT in Cluj the situation is largely the same.

In our last issue, we’ve asked many questions, some philosophical, some statistical, some to the point, others completely open, most requiring complex answers in need of in depth research. As a result, we began with the more approachable side, the technical one, discovering straight away that most of its history profits from an abundance of information made available due to the “great achievements of the people” cult, specific to the political medium that gave birth to the Romanian IT. Also, in the same direction, we benefited from our readers support, and I’m taking this opportunity to give my thanks to Mr. Marius Muntean, for all the materials he sent.

It started simple, with a single question, which in the following days gave birth to whole series of questions, that stirred, not only my curiosity, but that of everybody I tested the new idea on. The initial question was voiced by Răzvan Florian, and it emerged in the following context: we were sitting next to each other at a regioNet meeting named “Clusters and networks – Engines of development for the growth of competitiveness and innovation capacity”. Right after the status update on the Cluj IT Cluster (30 companies, totaling 3500 employees and a 8 million Euro turnover), came professor Sergiu Nedevschi turn.

NEXT2012 conference, organized by Softvision, provided the opportunity and pleasure to meet and watch Scott Barber, also known as “the face of performance testing”. A self declared geek which upon a first Google-ing does not strike you through his publishing career or hit percentage in the returned results. This not only enhances the pleasure of the first encounter, but as you get to know him, turns out to be a very good portrait. Scott is a pragmatic fellow who chooses the hands on approach, over the academic one,

I will start by setting forth a dilemma concerning the selection of the interviewee for this number of the magazine: Mr. Dan Luțaș. We were colleagues during high school and college and I’d like to consider him a good friend. At first, this caused an internal conflict between the objectivity in choosing and presenting this article and the subjectivism brought about by the interference of my personal life with my professional career. At the local level, there are many experts whose achievements recommend them for the interview, without generating this conflict, so I’ll be brief in explaining why I stuck to this choice.

Researchers are often perceived as lonely individuals spending their whole lives closed in laboratories and working with complicated instruments or formulas. However a little research will prove that most famous researchers collaborated, interacted and debated with their peers and were public figures frequently. Even Albert Einstein, thought by many to simply have appeared out of the blue and completely revolutionized Physics, gathered Maurice Solovine, a Romanian student, and Conrad Habicht, a Swiss mathematician, to form Olympia Academy, an informal group that had regular meeting and discussed latest scientific discoveries, own work and even philosophy and literature two years before his “miracle year”. Innovation and discoveries come as much from dedicated solitary work, as from collaborative research and exchange of ideas and findings.