I met Iulian and Vlad almost a year ago, when they came at our doorstep with an idea of an application dedicated to mobile platforms, called Foody. Iulian brought in his experience in the HORECA domain, Vlad, his technical expertise and Gemini Solutions Foundry the knowledge acquired during the 10 years of working with startups. So, we sat down at the table and started to re-turn the idea on all sides and polish it in order to define an MVP as good as possible, which would later be released on the market.

Better than a propeller driven drone, the Bionic Bird: the first lifelike bird, controllable by hand movement, is the object of a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo. Edwin Van Ruymbeke, chief executive of XTIM, aeronautical engineer and inventor of the Bionic Bird, is presenting an ornithopter that can fly with bird like agility. XTIM has been working on this extraordinary smartphone controlled bird for 3 years.

Is clear that, as in any other project or organization, „communication” forms the basic of teamwork and human interaction, both regarding founders and users, or other stakeholders. So, from this perspective, I asked myself if I had to start a new startup, how would I do it? What advice would I give myself based on the experience so far? And the answer you’ll find below. I got in touch with the startups world almost 3 years now and so far I have been involved in UseTogether (with its spin-off - Momly) and ZenQ.

The first challenge of any outsourcing company is to get clients. Once (and if) you do, the pressure moves on to keeping the partnership going and growing. To keep things on an honest side, in the beginning of the relationship with your new client you are far from being partners (even further from trusted partners). You are considered a vendor and in the beginning there will be a normal and expected dose of scepticism. But the relationship can evolve and it may go through the following stages described in the lines below. I didn’t come up with and can’t take credit for them, but I find them to be very valid

In this article, I will describe the typical mistakes that can lead to some serious security issues and also the proper solutions that allow us to defend against this kind of threats. If you care about security in Windows, this article is for you! Of course there are more than 5 common mistakes…but if you start to think about all of these shown in this article, your network will become significantly more secure! The reasons of these mistakes are very typical: lack of time, lack of monitoring systems, lack of knowledge. Often, common mistakes are very serious and can lead to some serious security breaches. Nobody likes when the passwords of your users are being cracked, right?

Tables represent one of the most powerful tools used in JavaFX for displaying data, supporting the following actions:

• Reordering the columns displayed by the user
• Multiple sorting of the columns
• Resizing
• Cell factories for customizing cell content
Read more

Automation represents a very important component in IT, whether it is used for software development (in continuous integration, for example) or for the administration of different systems and infrastructure. In the case of big, dynamic environments, implementing a form of automation represents one of the most basic needs in order to ensure the optimization of the resource management.  

In the last 3 months I tried to talk about different subjects presented in Clean Code. Even if this is the 4th article about this topic, I have the feeling that there are so many things that we should talk about when we are talking about a clean and good written code. We could say that the ‘Clean Code’ book, written by Robert C. Martin, has set the standards in our industry from this perspective. It is the developers’ Bible and many times it is used as the ‘law’ of the code. I don’t want to go deeper into this subject, but I promise that one day I will talk in detail about why we should (not) use this book as THE Bible.

One of the oldest military treatises and one of the most successful is "Sun Tzu's Art of War". The book was written around 500 BC by a general from the court of King of Wu, and presents a set of 13 chapters with precepts about tactics and strategies in warfare. I've read the book for the first time some years ago, but looking at some trends in the communication techniques and management style determined me to read it again.

One of the main challenges that Agile teams are facing is the way it plans the testing activities so that: - the team is actually testing what the Product Owner thought of in the acceptance criteria - it copes with continuously changing requirements - it has a clear overview on how much of the acceptance criteria is being automated tested and finds the right balance between the effort invested in testing (both automated and manual) and the actual importance/impact/risk of the scenario being tested

Peter Lawrey is a Java expert who appeared on the third position in the StackOverflow chart. We have the pleasure to have him as special guest to Cluj IT Days 2014, where he will deliver a technical presentation on “Hot topics in Java Performance Tuning”, as well as a presentation on his experience as an independent consultant: “What I have learnt by becoming an independent consultant”. Moreover, Peter is having a one day workshop on Java Performance

Theory says that 90 percent of a project manager’s work is communication and if theory says that, there must be some truth in it. The real important thing is the fact that communication is all over the place for the project manager and the theory makes him aware of this from its first chapters. What we often don’t realize is that polishing our communication skills starts much sooner and it is part of our job and our lives more that we knowingly realize. Referring to our work environment only, communication goes around among people with different communication skills and different backgrounds (e.g. developer, tester, administrator, hr).

When I first heard about Share Cluj, the project was yet an idea, the team was still discussing about the purpose of the project, thinking how to involve more people and how to put Cluj on the world map. Initially, my role in the project was to be an ambassador but, by participating to a team meeting having as main subject the technical part, I immediately became a member of the team. 

I have seen in my 15 years career as a developer, technical lead, project manager, freelancer, trainer, agile/lean/technical coach and again developer many failures of software development. I have also seen unexpected successes.  From all industries, software development seems rather unpredictable. As a client, you can ask for a feature that looks simple and should take a day or two, (eg. Add Euro support to an accounting system designed for French Francs) and it takes two months. Or you can ask for a feature that looks awfully complex, and it takes one day. What should you expect? A 10 times budget increase for the feature set that you need, or to have the software earlier than expected?