Today’s interview differs from the previous ones through its main subject: ITCamp conference, represented by Mihai Tataran, who cofounded it along with Tudor Damian. Let’s start by introducing our guest: ITCamp conference 2012 “is a premium confe¬rence for specialists in Microsoft technologies”. In the hosts vision, the conference gets its premium from the speakers, ”the best speakers we can bring [..] extremely well-known people, which at top world class conferences like TechEd or PDC, constantly rank among the Top 10 rated speakers, based on audience feedback grades, and we have four of them this year”. The Microsoft technologies focus comes from this desire to invite only the best, Microsoft being the place where the two founders share the most connections and experience, allowing them optimum access, “If we were to spread out on several areas [technologies] it would prove more difficult to achieve this”.

In the beginnings of the Internet, during Web 1.0 ages, the general trend was to build portals where users could find many useful information about a certain subject. Everybody was impressed that an enormous amount of information could be found in one place. The hunger for information was finally satisfied. Then Web 2.0 generation arrived, which was more adapted to the demands of the new wave of users. These users already had the default right to have information one click away, but more important they needed to socialize, so everyone was connected in the virtual place.

One would probably wonder why a metric with such a complicated name is needed since experts developers, architects, requirements engineers etc.), directly involved in the production of information systems, already have their own methods (eg. Expert Judgment) that can estimate, with a margin of error, how long it would take to develop a product or a module / component of a software product. The method has as purpose: analyzing and improving productivity, project estimating, project control, using the method at different times of development phases.

Current dynamics of the software development industry is a real challenge for quality assurance. This is due to being orientated towards rapid and frequent delivery of applications (in the context in which their degree of complexity has increased), to the large number of end users and to their increasing expectations, to the different operating environments. We mentioned the growing expectations of customers, and we believe that there is no secret that they want increased quality for the offered products, rapid changes to them, personalized services and easy maintenance, integrated systems and, of course, delivery at prices as small as possible, preferably immediately.

The previous issue of the magazine talked about the trend of Big Data in the software industry. The current article presents the fundamentals of the technology that enables the storage and query of high volume of data. To get a better picture about the issues around Big Data, let’s take a look at an example. Not long ago there was this statistics showing up on the Internet: eBay collects about 20TB of user generated data daily. Facebook collects 20TB of user generated content and it generates another 10TB from daily analytics. The Insights service is powered by processing about 15PB of data. Google processes 20PT of data daily. It is pretty much clear that not only hardware is needed, but also a new kind of software concept is required to deal with such a data volume.

In the previous issue we covered Kinect, a new technology from Microsoft that can monitor the whole body of its users in real time. After a brief introduction, we included a sequence of code aimed at initializing the device and suitable for a Hello World type application. Next, we will take a detailed look at the sequence of code and try to explain how it works.

People are always talking about trends. Before starting to write this article, I did not have the curiosity to understand the deep meaning of the word. And as the best source is always the Dex , I started reading the simple and trivial explanations presented there. A trend represents a natural predisposition for something, a tendency, an attraction, a conscious action toward a defined purpose. Another definition describes the trend as an evolution of someone in a certain sense. Starting from this formulation I thought about what would be the connection between the trend and my work field

The Archimedes project is made of a mixture of innovative, integrated and ambitious measures for a clean environment, energy efficiency, lasting urban public transportation and, therefore, a meaningful impact over the politics for energy consumption, transport and environment protection. AROBS Transilvania Software has offered a complete solution – hardware and software – for the fluidization and creation of an enhanced comfort during the process of ticketing for public transportation in the city of Iasi, the beneficiary of this European Project.

Dependency Injection (DI) is a specialized form of Inversion of Control(IoC) – a broader OOP concept where objects are coupled by an external source at runtime – usually a container – also referred as IoC container. Using IoC we can select specific implementation of the dependencies at runtime which is a major advantage when dealing with Unit Testing for example. Injecting mock dependencies becomes trivial leading to easily test the application in isolation.

There are new processors coming. Two cores seem to be past, even on mobile; GPUs can be used for computational operations, and they have many cores - 1500+ these days, how do we use them all? What’s next, how do we keep the development pace with this shiny new hardware? Clouds are getting bigger today, we have processing clouds and data clouds, they can handle more requests than the human mind can imagine. We have lots of concurrent users on a single server, which needs to be fed with data. How do we handle so many requests?

“Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life” said Confucius. These would be the words that describe Marius Corîci the most. In 2003 he started doing business in the plumbing industry and co-founded ITS Group, a franchise for Romstal Company, the biggest plumbing installations retailer from South-Eastern Europe. In 2007 he moved into Artificial Intelligence field and founded Intelligentics, a group for Natural Language Processing. Now, he is very focused on infosec and got involved in all the biggest independent security projects in Romania

iCloud is a set of interfaces and services provided by Apple, for sharing data among different instances of the application running on different devices, in an easy to use and safe manner. To be able to work with iCloud, first you will need an App ID configured for iCloud. In the XCode project entitlements should be enabled and also iCloud needs to be set up on the deployment device (iCloud app cannot be tested on a simulator). Detailed configuration steps are not subject of this article, details can be found on https://developer.apple.com.

Meet Gogu! Gogu is a funny character, cynical at times, an introvert to whom the interior monologue is an alternative to the real life. With Gogu’s help, we explore different aspects of a project manager’s life trying to find and suggest solutions easy to understand and to apply. As Gogu would say: “almost common sense”. We invite you to follow Gogu and send him your comments and suggestions.