Short, intense and ever growing in popularity, CCC (Catalysts Coding Contest) has become a sort of ‘seasonal’ attraction for the programming enthusiasts from (but not limited to) Cluj. The Catalysts Coding Contests (http://contest.catalysts.cc) started in the year 2007 in Austria with a relatively low number of contestants but the feedback which came after was nothing short of „awesome”! Currently, the 18th edition of the contest will be hosted in Romania, Austria and India.

Cluj-Napoca is strategically well positioned in Eastern Europe due to its proximity to Belgrade, Budapest, Sofia, Kiev and Bucharest. Over 4,000 technology and computer science students graduate from Cluj universities each year which, when coupled to the creative arts, caused Huffington Post to rank it third among cities that are expected to shake up the art world. Cluj-Napoca was selected as the European Youth Capital 2015 and has been declared Europe’s most hospitable city by the European Commission. The local IT scene is well established within the CEE landscape. Initiatives that boost innovation and technological development will firmly establish it as Eastern Europe’s equivalent to the Silicon Valley.

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I think you chose the best moment to create this platform (Cluj Innovation City) and you will have all my and the European Commission’s support to materialize such value-added ideas. I thank you and learn that you can count on my support.” - Mr. Dacian Ciolos, European Commissioner
The second edition of Cluj Innovation Days (CID) was, by all accounts, a success. During the two days Cluj-Napoca became the capital of innovation in Romania.

Thanks to the recent expansion in flight routes from Cluj, I can now take a 15 minute drive to the local airport, then get on a plane to virtually anywhere in Europe or the Middle East, and arrive there that same day in time for a meeting. On my recent visit to Israel I had the chance to meet some remarkable people: a Nobel laureate of great renown and a famed venture capitalist who is also a social activist.

We all know it: startups have become a hot trend, especially in the last 7-8 years, with success stories which amaze us and give us a proper rush. If you are into tech, Silicon Valley is undoubltely a benchmark and a promised land for the entrepreneurs from anywere. And for good reasons. Cloning, more or less, the same model, places like London, Tel Aviv, Berlin, Tallin or even Paris have started to become more and more prominent as European epicentres for founding and developing startups. In a typically Transylvanian pacing, Cluj seems to follow the same model.

Nowadays, one of the first questions you are asked as a Quality Assurance Engineer, is do you use Automation? Test Automation has definitely been a hot topic in recent years. Everybody is talking about it, trying to use it, complaining about it, and still it remains very much an in house business, with each company developing its private solution tailored to its own products and needs. This is only natural as products vary a lot and, especially in the game of Enterprise Software, it is hard to imagine a single Test Automation solution that can be used regardless of the actual product being developed. This being said , working in Test Automation for a couple of years in which you can see firsthand the obstacles and the rewards of automation, you eventually come to ask yourself the obvious question: How do you win the game of Test Automation?

In the past years, iOS apps have become more and more visually appealing. Displaying images is a key part of that, that’s why most of them use images that need to be downloaded and rendered. Most developers have faced the need to populate table views or collection views with images. Downloading the images is resource consuming (cellular data, battery, CPU etc.); so, in order to minimize this, the caching model was developed.

Initiating a project can most of the times be boring when it is no longer a challenge. YEOMAN – how can it help us? When starting a new project, in order to enhance productivity and the pleasure of working, Yeoman is based on three tools:
Yo
It helps creating the files structure and it already specifies general configurations for Grunt and Bower.

In this article, we are trying to draw a basic map to programmatically manipulate xlsx files using Office Xml library. Many applications require working with excel files, either for reading and importing data from it, or for exporting data into reports, so it is important to know how to programmatically manipulate excel files. Since 2007, Excel files have completely changed their internal structure. Xls was a proprietary binary file format, whereas xlsx is an Xml Based-format, called Office Open Xml (OOXML).

In this article I will try to build upon the concept of Behavior Driven Development(BDD), using the JavaScript testing framework Jasmine. As we already know, JavaScript had a long way down the road, becoming from a simple scripting language, for the world wide web, a full stack development language. Because of this reason it happens, that we have, sometimes undesired, a migration of the business logic from back-end to front-end. This adds a new level of complexity on our client-side layer, therefore this layer will have more responsibilities. What I want to address here, is that once we have more responsibilities on client-side, the project›s maintenance costs are directly impacted.

Solving a task or reading an article from a magazine takes usually no more than a few minutes. Meanwhile, the chances to be disturbed are very high – either to check your phone, your email or your Facebook notifications. Additionally, if you are sitting in your office, your colleagues’ discussions about cars, football or fashion, might capture your attention. Even if you are trying to keep focus, you cannot refuse your colleague who kindly asks you for help. And this is how your focus is definitely lost. With all of these happening, your boss is still wondering why your task isn’t finished yet.

Nowadays, due to the advance of the technology and easy access to information, almost anybody has the opportunity to build virtually any software product or service and address it to the global market. Despite its relatively short history, the software industry has flourished attracting a huge interest and effort into developing, testing, marketing, and selling its products, amongst many other related activities. The Requirements Engineering (RE) [1,2] is a crucial part of the software development process. It has been proven, both in the literature [3,4,5] and from our experience in ISDC, that functional misunderstandings or inaccurate business activity models imply far smaller costs when discovered during the requirements development or the grooming stages than when their effects appear after the software goes into production.

Popular belief about entropy leaves no room for interpretations: the bigger the entropy the greater the chance for disorder and chaos to lurk their ugly heads at every step. This means unpredictability, which of course is not amongst the desired qualities of a good design. However, as we shall see in a minute, big entropy (I am referring here to Shannon entropy not the thermodynamics version, although there are similarities) is not a quality of bad design, in fact we are not able to say anything more about a design by looking at its overall entropy than that it solves a certain problem which needs that many states as the design allows.

One of the most important factors that contributed to the huge successes of machine learning in the last 10 years was the increased computing power. In 2010, Dan Cireșan et al. have set the new state of art for handwritten digits using an algorithm developed in the 1980s and by augmenting the data set with a procedure described in 1990. The only difference was the amount of computing power: using a modern GPU they finished training in one day, which might have taken 50 days on a CPU.

Ever wanted to build a web application extremely fast, without the need of learning a new programming language? Ever wondered why it is still too complicated to quickly create web pages with forms and reports and why every Rapid Application Development tool out-there becomes “rapid” only after spending a few months learning it? Ever wanted to build a web application extremely fast, without the need of learning a new programming language? Ever wondered why it is still too complicated to quickly create web pages with forms and reports and why every Rapid Application Development tool out-there becomes “rapid” only after spending a few months learning it?

The current article is an overview about the changes that occurred in the skobbler navigation app for iOS platform in time and the current features set, high level architecture and the innovations introduced with the 5.0 version, which is available on the App Store since December 2013. This product was first launched on the iOS market in October 2009. At that point in time, skobbler was the first one to use map data powered by OpenStreetMap, a small community of enthusiasts striving to change the whole approach on maps. The app delivered turn-by-turn navigation and audiovisual advisory, based on permanent internet connection.

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This article presents the results of a study regarding the way students think about ten well-known IT companies in Cluj. Being, most likely, future employees of these companies, their opinions may help IT companies to reconsider their policies regarding applicants, both for HR practices, as well as PR ones. Therefore, companies can better define their place in the IT local community. As a consulting company in Organizational and Managerial Development, working frequently with IT companies from Cluj, we wanted to find out more about this industry.

Lumy.ro is the first usability testing platform in Romania, launched by the REEA company – www.reea.net. It is for the first time in our country that the companies, but also the self-employed persons, have the possibility to find out the opinion of the users they are targeting through their web and mobile products. Following the tests, the platform will provide accurate information about the website or the Facebook application the developers have produced, even before launching it on the market.

I recall facing this question myself five years ago, when I accepted the assignment to roll out an improvement programme on a 150+ IT services company. At the time it seemed to me a few months assignment which ends when “we write down our processes and then get CMMI certified”. What a simplistic, foolish view! Now I wish I could give some advice to the younger me… however, since that’s not possible, it may make sense sharing some lessons learned along the way - sometimes the hard way - hoping that someone else will benefit from them.

In the last number of Today Software Magazine we talked about the base principles of AOP and how we can implement the base concept of AOP using features of .NET 4.5, without using other frameworks. In this article we look at Unity and see how we can use this framework to implement AOP.