Created, designed and built in Cluj

My experience is that a product should always target a specific market. Trying to cover everything brings a lot of complexity and impacts usability - SMB organizations typically have less than 300 VMs and less than 25TB storage. This leads to one of the first things to keep in mind about backup. You need to consider the infrastructure - the size and topology. You need to choose the right backup tool and the right environment, based on the hypervisor vendors and size (VMs and data). One of the most important questions is how often you make backups and how often you have to store and archive them. Customers will refer to this as the RPO (Recovery Point Objective). If you have no legal requirements for retention and archiving, you should apply the 3-2-1 rule as a minimum standard.

When I began my career as a software engineer, I could not have imagined the important roles adaptability and soft skills would play in achieving successful outcomes for projects. In those early days, I believed that everything was black or white, that analytical and problem solving skills were my greatest assets, and that communication should always be direct and concise. Reality showed me a different picture. I joined Flow Traders in 2011 and I immediately found myself working with a wide variety of people, not just the machine in front of me. I had never considered that I might need to sell a solution to someone, or that I would need to explain the architecture of a big project to a non-technical person. These were new skills that I needed to learn. In this article I will share my experience of working at a company where diversity feels at home - the perfect place to develop communication skills and learn the value of our differences.

I was talking with an old friend of mine the other day about how we perceive each other, about the things that matter when we perceive others, about their professional success or about their career models. The strategy for career development in one direction or the other was influenced by the expectations that we had and the things we really wanted. Progress is measured based on the accomplished projects and the knowledge we gain. I believe that it is no longer enough to look in one direction only. We need to assimilate the experience of several perspectives to answer the labor market needs.

Do you want an application that automatically starts up your favorite or most indispensable applications? Write an AutoIt script! It will ease your routines and launch everything you need for work while you enjoy your morning coffee. While there are many great automation tools like Selenium, Sikuli, AutoHotkey available, AutoIt is easy to learn, it is freeware and it is fast – perfect for task automation based on GUI and for carrying out all kinds of tests related to performance!

The implementation of various calculus techniques can and must be regarded as a means of accelerating the presence of all material and spiritual conditions that continuously increase our level of civilization. (Rev. Stiinţă şi tehnică/The Science and Technology Review 1986).  Even if the quotation pertains to ages long gone by, which were times when many things occurred in a different manner than what was expected, yet, the focus on science and research in IT has been around since 1965 when the first research institutes in electronics appeared. In 1970 the first Romanian computer is produced at industrial scale, Felix C-256. In 1975 Intreprinderea de Echipamente Periferice/The Peripheral Equipment Company (IEPER) was founded together with the Romanian-American society, Romcontrol Data. During the same year, the new models from the Romanian computer family, namely Felix, appear. These were the computers that had been exported to Communist countries for 10 years. This first computer family, exclusively destined to solving the requirements of industrial units regarding production management and other applications, as well as economic and central units, was followed by the emergence of Coral, Cub and other computer brands.

In a general, as a widely accepted definition, quality of a product is the main characteristic that differentiates that aforementioned product in relation to other, similar products available on the market. Quality implies meeting the customer’s expectations, at a cost that the customer affords (or: agrees) to pay, so that we, as a provider of goods or services, will be able to do this the next day and the day after that. A bug-free product is not necessarily a good-quality product. Quality is as good as its perception by the end-users, as good as meeting the end-users’ expectations. Of course, a bug-free product is more likely to be perceived as a good one, but that’s just part of the whole picture. This is an important part, no one could argue about, but just one part of the picture. “Quality Assurance” is the set of activities aiming to build quality into our final product. It consist of preventive and corrective actions that ensure us and our customers that the product we deliver meets their expectations. Customers’ expectations derive from the intended use of our product and from various legal or industry standards.

Over the past 6 months, I’ve been working with a customer who develops hardware appliances. They were facing a challenge with complaints from users about one of their products, which appeared a few months in. Needless to say, the cause of such bugs requires long and thorough investigation. The hardware appliance runs a real-time OS, which is currently in transition from a proprietary system to FreeRTOS. Most of the code is written in C, and it uses system calls for creating threads and synchronizing them. The codebase is old, since it has been running for about 10 years.

We live in a world that is used to think about the household products, the accessories, the cars and all the items we rely on daily just based on the purpose they have been created for. A coffee machine, for example, will help you better start of the day, while the hand bracelet, a shiny / colourful item, is meant to fit in with your look and mood.

Smartweb is a two-day conference dedicated to front-end development and design. It takes place in Bucharest, annually. There are eight presentations each year, and a few of the topics addressed this year are: responsive images, CSS layouts, and tips & tricks for optimising performance.

Since our childhood we were taught that hard work and perseverance are the key ingredients for success, especially when it comes to career development. Once you become a student, you start to dream about a job that will cover your financial needs, that will develop your talents and that will constantly develop yourself. So, you’ve decided to try this recipe, being more than convinced that it will work. You’ve done everything by the book; you’ve gathered all the hard skills needed for your dream job. However, once you enter the organizational environment, you probably notice that your colleagues are as good and qualified as you. Well, it seems that your initial recipe needs one more ingredient.