We live in a world that is governed by data, a volume of data that grows exponentially each year. No wonder that we hear more and more about “Big Data technologies”. If, at the very beginning, the Big Data ecosystem was simply a collection of tools meant to cope with the data volume, now it also has to address the speed problem. As everything happens so fast around us and data driven decisions are taken on the spot, the real-time processing of events takes the lead stage in this whole Big Data realm. The paper takes a look at some options to setup such a system, capable of ingesting and processing a stream of data in real time.

Read more

In this issue, I will focus on a different ecosystem. I am writing this text while I am in Chișinău for a few startup events and workshops. I was pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm and energy of the people there. Aware of their economic and political situation, they are hungry to improve, to grow the ecosystem, knowing that technology is a ladder that can take them to the next level, just like us, in Romania, some years ago. There are more than 15 supporting organisations, events or coworking spaces which contribute to this growth and we will see successful examples soon for sure.

In software development process, one practice became very popular, even mandatory, and that practice is continuous integration. Depending on the technology used in the project, continuous integration can be integrated in more ways. In this article we will present a solution to continuous integration from the perspective of mobile app development for iOS platform. Our solution relies on Xcode Server and on Fabric.IO which is a online distribution framework.

We are a company which seeks to grow the IT community and invest in the development of people’s IT skills. We believe that investing in the professional development of IT and Software professionals is an investment in the future of our company. Our initiatives to support the educational system range from the support given to BA degree programs, the support given to reconversion programs and the organization of specialized educational programs. Therefore, we chose to invest, alongside other IT companies in the BA program run by Babeș-Bolyai University, the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, the German line. In addition to the financial support we provide for this line of study, the students enrolled in the Ist, IInd and IIIrd year of this program, carry on their courses and seminars at the NTT DATA Romania headquarters in Cluj Napoca, in the laboratories and the rooms specially designed to accommodate didactical activities.

When using SAP HANA, you can calculate the outcome of your business directly, on the original data, in the main memory, without any need to transfer the data. Many of these calculations can be graphically modeled as special data views in SAP HANA Studio, without the need of any supplementary code. This paper focuses on the options that SAP HANA makes available for data modeling. These options lie at the core of the development process which produces HANA applications. The business data of a given field are memorized (usually in a normalized format) in tables from the database, which are connected via a foreign key (the so-called entity-relationship model). With the help of this data model, unique registrations can easily be made, selected or modified. Nevertheless, if the access to the data becomes more dynamic and complex, or if certain analyses or checks are necessary, the data needs to be transformed.

A while ago a dream was born. A dream forged from the deepest fears of the software development world. The dream of delivering pure, clean, quality code on TIME. As the community was growing and the idea got seeded in the hearts of the people, a movement arose and so the CONTINUOUS DELIVERY concepts took shape. Now, in all seriousness, as an aspirant software developer, getting you code to market in the shortest period possible, must be one of your main goals. It may seem simple at first, you automate as many processes as necessary to reduce the time you wait for your colleagues to validate the "masterpiece" you wrote and to decide whether it will see the light of production. Well, it may become a hard and frustrating piece of work if it's not done properly from the beginning.

Read more

As we are getting ready for the next edition, we thought of introducing the team and of giving you some more reasons to attend the 4th edition of MobOS. MobOS stands for the Mobile Operating Systems Community and the associated annual event, aimed at sharing technical knowledge, at bringing an international perspective and at giving you the chance to network with minds alike. In less than 4 years, MobOS grew steadily, becoming, at the moment, the biggest conference on mobile technologies in Romania. Started in 2013, it now has a team of 4 individuals connected by the passion for technology and mobile. Let us get to know them and see what it’s in it for you - the passionate mobile developer curious for more and looking forward to meeting people like yourself.

We, the authors, have over a decade’s experience in running GNU/Linux in a corporate setting and we would like to share that with you, to make your journey easier. However, first, why would you want to run GNU/Linux at work rather than the operating system supplied by your employer? We don’t know, but here are some of our reasons for running it:
- It is faster – Generally, GNU/Linux is faster on the same hardware than other operating systems. Moreover, there is a quirk in corporate settings which makes this even more true: security software. You can probably get away with not installing any under GNU/Linux (because it’s not available and GNU/Linux is less susceptible to security issues), your machine will be 2x as fast.

Hello! I am Cătălin Beșleagă, and I was born and raised in Dorohoi. Around the age of 8-9 years old, with my brother, I learned what the format command does, and, later on, I discovered what the boot sector does, after having erased it trying to free some disk space. The first contact I had with development started when I was around 10 years old at “Clubul Copiilor”, where I attended an initiation class in BASIC. I graduated IT at UBB and then I enrolled in an MA on Databases. I love to travel and learn about different cultures. I enjoy mountain trekking and photography, and I recently discovered I am passionate about flying.

Despite everybody’s good intentions, seemingly ignoring the effort invested and the relevance of the ideas thrown into the game, extremly lots of projects end-up creating products that nobody wants, nobody asked for and/or cannot possibly be sold. So, which might be the causes for such situations, considering that we live in an increasingly measured society, over-exposed to management processes and formal models, which practically guarantees minimum exposure to risk, from the success rate point of view?

Read more

In the world of smart devices, devices are more and more chatty.  Let’s assume that we have a smart device that needs to send, every 30 seconds, a Location Heartbeat that contains . Worldwide we have 1.000.000 devices that send this information to our backend. At global level, backend runs on 4 different Azure Regions, with an equal distribution of devices. This means that, on each instance of our backend, there will be 250.000 devices that send heartbeats with their locations. From a load perspective, it means that, on each Azure Region, there are around 8.300 heartbeat requests every second. 8K messages per second might be an acceptable load or not. It depends on what actions we need to do for each request.

In a 2001, a report from the World Health Organisation warns us that depression will be the second most important cause of illness and disability by year 2020. This is a gloomy prediction that hopefully has the power to make us aware of the factors that determine depression. Prevention is obviously preferable to treatment when it comes to this condition that has complex psychosocial causes and processes. The causes can differ from person to person and from culture to culture, but there are similarities nontheless. In the next paragraphs, we will explore a widely-spread phenomenon that constitutes an indirect, but very important factor that leads to depression: stress. We will further discuss a useful tool for leaders and employees as well, that helps identifying and eliminating work-related stress.

Why should you be relaxed when beginning a conversation with your colleague or your employee? There has just been a drama, the first in the world and in the company. You have every reason to feel stressed. It is well known that stress, the 21st century epidemic, is taken for a joke in Romania. It seems that the incredible sums of money lost by a company do not impress the bosses, but they admit that neither the employees whose mental, emotional, behavioral and interpersonal health is severely affected, nor the employers stress about this subject.