This month has marked a new phase in the efforts of building a relevant identity for the Cluj IT Cluster, but also an opportunity of development on a course of innovation for our association members. The project presented last year by Cluj IT within the operation POSCCE / Op.1.3.3 is in the last phase of signing the financing contract, and it will be implemented for a period of 18 months after signing. It is the result of an effort of preparation of more than a year.

I’ve been wondering lately what it means to create/deliver a successful mobile app. Competition in the app business today is so fierce, you have to develop/deliver no less than the possible best and most fluid app ever to stay in the game. I’ve been a SQA engineer in the mobile world for 4 years now, so for me delivering great apps is really important. Since you won’t find a recipe for success in just one article I’m going to share with you my findings and personal experiences, to help you build your best app yet.

It’s spring… the time of changes and hope… Oracle contributes to all that with a new version of the standard Java platform. I am talking about version 8, released in March 2014. Beginning with the current issue of Today Software Magazine, I wish to change the type of articles that I write. I cannot say I abandon the idea of book reviews, which represent an important way of putting forth some valuable books from the IT library, but I will also add some articles of a higher technical degree. By doing this, I hope the readers of the magazine will be incited to discover what is new and performant in the world of software applications development.

After so many nerves lost over all the quirks and twists and turns of C++ with OpenGL and MFC, working with C# or Java was like a breath of fresh air. But on a day of Irish rain and wind, in a dim cubicle in a corner of an office, along came Qt and a wonderful C++ world opened up, with new revelations ever since. After moving over to Qt, working with C++ became a joy again, and it is one of the environments I most dearly work in. Development is quite an experience, everything remaining native, fast and easily maintainable in the same time.

If you don’t have APIs you don’t exist. Well, to be fair, it would be more correct to say that without APIs you don’t exist in the cloud, but then again, can you exist outside the cloud nowadays? You must be thinking: nice compilation of buzzwords to start an article. Thank you! I hope the rest of the article will be equally compelling or less repulsive, depending on your taste for buzzwords.

In this article, which is split into multiple parts, I’m going to address the issue of keeping your Linux servers up to date. More often than not, when starting to administer the servers of a startup business, the systems administration team finds an already created datacenter setup around a bunch of servers installed with the needed software, which is often a chaotically configured, “barely functioning” setup done by the first team of developers, doing DevOps jobs.

When someone says “data modeling”, everyone thinks automatically to relational databases, to the process of normalizing the data, to the 3rd normal form etc.; and that is a good practice, it also means that the semesters studying databases paid off and affected your way of thinking and working with data. However, ever since college, things have changed, we do not hear so much about relational databases, although they are still used with predominance in applications. Nowadays, “big data” is in trend, but it is also a situation when more and more applications need to handle: the volume, the velocity, the variety, and the complexity of the data (according to Gartner’s definition).

The word Kata comes from martial arts: it is the Japanese translation of the word form. Kata is used to describe detailed, choreographed patterns of movement that can be practiced either alone or in pairs. It can also describe other actions from martial arts like: training, highly detailed simulated combats, and others.

Requirement elicitation is commonly mentioned among business analysts, but where do these requirements originally come from? It is quite complicated to understand and start collecting the required functionality as the product stakeholders’ explanations are often ambiguous, diverse and lacking of technical terminology. But how do you manage to identify and write down all the functionalities required by the stakeholders, the user roles and their actions? The answer is pretty simple – you have to perform a use case analysis in order to capture the contracts between the system and its users and then refine the system’s use cases and obtain an organized and more complete view.

The natural career of a software developer is: junior programmer, senior programmer, technical lead / team leader, optionally architect and then it turns into management. There’s something paradoxical about this path: the career that started with writing code ends in not writing code at all anymore. After all, how can you keep up with all the new and shiny stuff that appears in technology each year? A new type of career has surfaced in the recent years, one that’s much more interesting. We will look in this article at people who don’t fit this profile, at those developers who still write code and can help others even if they are 40, 50 or 60 years old. Robert C. Martin. Michael Feathers. Rebecca Wirfs-Brock. How are they different? How can they keep up with changes?

Or the moment when trend beats logic. A while ago one colleague of mine wrote a very interesting article about best practices on Agile methodologies. If looking at the title you would expect a set of rules which would allow you to be the best Agile person on the planet, we pleasantly discover that in real life these rules are actual guidelines and adaptations to thousands of different situations. This article made me a little more aware of the next situation: how many times did you actually hear somebody saying: “On my project we implement Scrum 100%”. It’s like somebody would say “I have a perfect life”. It happens only from time to time and not on Earth.

A 2013 research shows that 77% of the consumers prefer receiving an email instead of a social media message or an SMS. In 2014, an email campaign with a powerful marketing content can be a powerful, revenue generating tool. Before planning any campaign you should make sure that:
The data base only contains users who have agreed to receive email communications from the company.
Users who have bought a product or service in the last 18 months.

How to Web is launching MVP Academy, a pre-acceleration program dedicated to Central and Eastern European startups. Between April 30 and May 17, teams that are working on innovative tech products will be able to apply for the program by filling the registration form available online at www.mvpacademy.co.

Knowledge management is no longer imaginable without the Internet, with its capacity for storing enormous volumes of data, exchanging information about developments and trends, establishing contacts and creating business relationships. But an intensive exchange of know-how and experiences also calls for personal familiarity, and this is something the Internet on its own cannot deliver. For this reason, specialized technical conferences such as Topconf Bucharest are a key factor when it comes to dynamic know-how transfer across technical, national and cultural borders.

The first event about webdesign, organized by Evensys last year, SmartWeb Conference, received a lot of appreciation from the local and from international practitioners from countries such as Germany, Bulgaria and Hungary. The positive feedback from the web community has determined us to launch the first edition of JSCamp, which will offer the new trends in web design and front-end development.

On April 4th-5th, Colors in Projects, in partnership with Today Software Magazine, went fo the third time to meet Cluj with the event ...even mammoths can be Agile.Apart from previous editions, this time we had two parallel streams and World Café sessions. Participants had the possibility to choose what presentations to attend based on their topics of interest. In the first stream, the presentations were focused on the ‚hard’ part of Agile, related to Information an Techology, and in the second the area of ‚soft skills’ was addressed. In the World Café sessions of both streams, the participants were invited to debate on different topics with the event speakers, who moderated the six groups formed.

Since social media platforms expanded through our lives, the amount of data exchanged across them has sharply upsurged. We write texts describing an idea, an opinion, a fact; we upload images and videos; we share our preferences by using simple buttons (“like”, “favorite”, “follow”, “share”, “pin” etc.); we accept in the network people we know very well in our real life and people we have never met before and probably never will – … and everything goes in the network almost in real time! Suddenly, we realize that the unit measure of the data handled in a given amount of time reaches the order of exabytes. This data is not only big in volume, but is also extremely diverse and it moves at incredible speeds. The information contained in it is relatively incommensurable. Fact is Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest can see when you fall in love, what is your mood, where you are and many other behaviors that you decide to show.

iBeacon is a popular term among mobile developers these days. The technology enables an iOS device (with at least iOS 7 installed) or an Android device (at least 4.4 version required) to wake up applications on devices in close proximity. It’s mainly used for indoor positioning, you can think of it as complementary to GPS because it can also give information regarding where the user is indoor: are they close to the shoe store or are they looking at the chocolate isle in a hypermarket.

We have expectations from ourselves to be rational beings, maybe with very few exceptions. We certainly have these expectations from everybody else. This is most visible at the organizational level. People HAVE TO behave rationally/reasonably/logically. We expect us, but mostly everybody else, to analyze the situations objectively, decide rationally the course of action and then implement it according to the plan. We expect to be computing machines that use predictable and accurate algorithms and operate with little or no flaw.

In many projects we deal with situations when we have to process text, generate reports, scripts or source code. Many times these problems can be solved with the help of certain tools called template processors. However, the most common scenario for using template processors is that of web development, where the need to separate business logic from the presentation layer was identified. When it comes to web applications developed using Java technologies, JavaServer Pages was the standard for the presentation layer for a long time.

Many of you have dreamt of being entrepreneurs. And maybe, one day you had a great business idea. So, you entered a partnership with one or several friends skilled in a specific field and… you set up a startup. ‘Entrepreneur’ and ‘startup’ are two fashionable words. They are repeatedly used in almost all relevant conferences and meetings, where it is emphasized that any startup must be planned in detail and in perspective - from concept, business model, financing, development to how to benefit of SEO and social media – all in view of gaining success.

Gogu leisurely screwed the cap on the water bottle, made sure it is well sealed, screwed it once more, which was completely useless, but it was obvious he was doing all that while his mind was wandering elsewhere. Misu saw he was thoughtful and probably thought it was the best opportunity to pick on him, as it had been long since they had a verbal fight and he didn’t want to lose touch:
“Hoo, brrrr…” he said quite loudly, staring at Gogu. But he didn’t react, so, Misu repeated it, this time even more loudly: