Java 8 is beautiful. Yes, I class it as feminine even before reaching the magic number of 8. In this article I will dare to analyze to what extent this beauty is shape versus substance. I admit that Java has constantly left its fans dissatisfied when competing with other programming languages. Lambda expressions. Yes, C# has Lambda expressions from version 2007 which was launched in 2007. Java needed 7 additional years to offer it. Functional programming came really late.

With the coming of the Information Age we found solutions to previous problems but also new problems waiting to be solved. Information abounds in the digital environments but is not always easy to obtain a view of it so that we can take important decisions based on it. For this purpose the Business Intelligence tools promise to provide solutions for transforming the raw information data that we have.

Last November „Fundația Comunitară Oradea” (http://www.fundatiacomunitaraoradea.ro) offered a few grants for ideas that can be put into practice within a year, to make the community we live in a better place. I was one of the lucky few whose project was approved and I wanted to share my way of thinking when developing for the project. The proposed project was all about the process of continuous feedback to and from local authorities on the state of the city through a web app specially crafted for this purpose: change through technology.

Usually, a test written in Selenium, Java and TestNG is meant to check the accuracy of items on a web page or that of a module on a web page. The classical approach of such a type of testing is represented by the high number of asserts, to compare all the desired properties to their expected values. This approach has plenty of drawbacks, among which we could mention the difficult maintenance of tests, the waste of code-lines, lack of intelligibility. In order to avoid these drawbacks, a different approach of this type of tests is represented by the conception of tests based on the comparison of some objects.

Risk Management is a very widely used term in today’s world of software engineering. Almost every project suffers from threats which can seriously affect its cost, schedule or quality in a negative way. According to an IBM study only 40% of projects meet schedule, budget and quality goals. Other analyses conclude that “between 65 and 80% of IT projects fail to meet their objectives, and also run significantly late or cost far more than planned.”

On the 2nd of June, I took part in Techsylvania, an event 100% dedicated to entrepreneurship. Such an event, which can be considered to target only a limited part of audience, from the point of view of the local industry, represented a premiere for Cluj. The first part of this event was represented by a local hackaton, where the participants had the opportunity to develop applications for devices such as Google Glasses, Small printer, Onyx Beacons, Leap motion, Sphero, Sony Smartwatch 2, Pebble, Oculus VR, EyeTribe Tracker.

On 3rd of June 2014, the international conference JSCamp (a JavaScript conference for Romania and Eastern Europe), the first of its kind in our country, took place in Bucharest. The event was dedicated mostly to the people from Web Design and Front End Development. This first edition was splitted into four intensive sessions about web development trends, case studies and international experiences, open-web technologies and advanced tools.

I T.A.K.E. Unconference took place in Bucharest in 29-30th of May. The conference was organized by Mozaic Works. I T.A.K.E. Unconference wanted, and successfully managed, to break the classical conference pattern. Besides the classical presentations and keynotes, it contained workshops, coding katas, coding contests and the interesting concept of “open space”, where participants could gather spontaneously and approach various discussion topics. It was an event for geeks, the proposed themes being True Software Stories, Architecture and Design Practices, Beautiful Data and Technical Leadership.

Bucharest, May 26 2014 – How to Web MVP Academy, pre-acceleration program for CEE early stage tech startups, proudly presents its finalist teams. In between June 2nd and July 22nd they will work together with mentors and experienced professionals in order to develop their products and learn how to take advantage of the opportunities available on the global market. Tech startups building products in software, hardware, internet of things, mobile, medtech or ecommerce have submitted their application for How to Web MVP Academy.

We had the opportunity to make an interview with Dan Romescu, founder of DruidCon and president of Augmented Reality Fundation. Dan will talk at DevTalks conference, www.devtalks.ro in 11 june in Bucharest.
What is your opinion on Google Glasses from the perspective of private life? In one of your recent presentations you’ve mentioned a led that should be included in order to let the other people know about the fact that we are recording.
[Dan Romescu] Google Glasses present, at the moment, a very high character of intrusion in everyday life.

How fast could you create a software product starting from an idea? This is the purpose of this article. We will explain our concept of starting with an idea, finding the core value of the idea and then put it into the hands of users as fast as possible. In order to start one needs to have a clear idea on what would be the product. Create a simple bullet point list of the concept, the core values of the product and how it could be monetized. But then how could you understand if it is useful or not?

The purpose of this article is to shed some light on the role and responsibilities of the product owner, as observed and implemented in the Cluj software world/environment by the author. The topic is broad and cannot be fully covered in a single article, but I would like to provide one of many points of view in which the subject can be tackled inside each team and company.

Visual Studio Online is a platform developed by Microsoft that offers a collection of services for software development. Services available are:
- Source repository (Team Foundation Version Control and Git)
- Tools for planning and tracking projects (work item tracking, planning, management – support for Agile: Scrum, Kanban)
- Test environment (Load testing)
- Continuous integration (build server)

If you’re reading this, you’re most likely a programmer. And, like any programmer, you had to search for programming questions online. I’m sure you noticed something interesting: in the last few years, when we search for a programming question online, a link to StackOverflow will usually be somewhere among the first 3 results from Google. This is no coincidence: StackOverflow has somehow entered the live of programmers, slowly but surely. We use it practically every day, but I noticed that most programmers don’t know too much about how this site was born, what principles it works on and why it’s so successful.

After working for thirteen years as a software developer, I have dedicated the last seven years to the software products’ quality management field. During the last four years, I have also been involved in recruiting specialists. Due to my career path, I have heard various opinions related to the tester profession, giving me the feeling that this profession and its career development potential are still misunderstood. Besides, the „tester” and „QA engineer” terms are often interchanged and used improperly.

Writing quality software is not an easy task. There are many unexpected situations for which you need to keep an eye out. The range of possible difficulties is really infinite and can vary from misunderstanding real project requirements and wasting good design opportunities to not having a fair and productive interaction with the rest of the team members.

The development and direction of the Romanian IT industry - Cluj Napoca in particular - has always been an attractive topic for me. I am the kind of person who always looks for the bigger picture; I try to understand the system or mechanism, how it “operates”, and then tweak it a bit. Just to get an idea in the 1900’s the average lifespan of a company was 80 years, in the 1950’s the average dropped to 50 years and in 2011 that reduced to a merely 8 years. This shows the increasing volatility of the global market and the fact that companies need to make adjustments very fast in order to survive the rapid changes in the environment they live in.

This was the question Jon Duschinsky – keynote speaker at the PMI Global Congress EMEA 2014 – asked the audience. I had the privilege to attend the Congress in Dubai, UAE, at the beginning of May. Jon was truly amazing and I will try to convey some of the bright ideas that stayed with me long after his speech. Duschinsky, recently voted as the world’s second most influential communicator in social innovation (the first being Bill Clinton), has a strong background in philanthropy and social innovation. In 2012, together with a team of some of the world’s leading creative thinkers, Jon co-founded “The Conversation Farm”.

Cloud is probably one of the most used term in IT industry of this decade; but what does the cloud actually mean? From its very beginnings, the “Internet” network has been represented visually, through diagrams, by a cloud, thus showing the fact that it is offered as a service, without revealing information about its technical implementation, offering only an interface for communicating with other networks.

In the last weeks we discovered together the base principles of Aspect Oriented Programing (AOP). Now is the time to see how we can use at real power the AOP characteristics using PostSharp. Before going straight to subject, let’s make a short recap. AOP is a programming paradigm with the main goal of increasing the modularity of an application. AOP tries to achieve this goal by allowing separation of cross-cutting concerns – using interception of different commands or requests.

Static code analysis (SCA) is the analysis of computer programs that is performed without actually executing the programs, usually by using an automated tool. SCA has become an integral part of the software development life cycle and one of the first steps to detect and eliminate programming errors early in the software development stage. Although SCA tools are routinely used in proprietary software development environment to ensure software quality, application of such tools to the vast expanse of opensource code presents a forbidding albeit interesting challenge, especially when opensource code finds its way into commercial software.

Using free/libre software confers many advantages to the persons/organizations doing so, especially if these users are technical (like software companies for example). This article will discuss these advantages and dispel some of the myths floating around free/libre software. Free software is software which respects your (the users’) freedoms . It is commonly written as free/libre (or colloquially “free as in freedom not as in beer”) to emphasize the fact that we’re not talking about price. Indeed, free software can be sold commercially - more about this shortly.

Recently, the macroeconomic forecasts seem rather positive for Romania. The latest news in this line talk about one of the greatest economic boosts in Europe, about the significant enhancement of the country rating by one of the most important global rating agencies and about a new law regarding the non-taxing of profits that are reinvested into technology. I personally believe that all these positive news and forecasts will have an intense effect of accelerating the investments in Romania.

The Ministry of Finance through the Department of State Aid will run from 1st of July a new scheme of state aid that will be valid until 31 December 2020 and will have a total budget of about 600 million euros, with the possibility of supplementing. Estimated total number of firms which will benefit of state aid is 1.500. Salary costs are considered eligible expenses recorded for a period of 2 years consecutive, following the creation of jobs.

Any entrepreneur (the IT domain not excepted) knows how difficult it is to build a brand and how important it is in a business – a prestigious trademark on the market, but also time, energy and money investments for advertising, promotion, etc. The brand plays an important role in the marketing strategy of any company and it contributes to the consolidation of its image and fame. For some companies, it even represents their most valuable asset.