What is a stereotype? A stereotype is a concept that puts a limit on reality. Stereotyping is represented as a negative paradigm, often present in the context of short-term decisions without a broad vision of the future. Corporations, generally those working in the IT field, have well-defined processes as a result of many years of analysis and testing of various techniques. Processes within a business are typically divided into three categories: primary, support, and management processes.

The quality of software products is becoming higher and higher and the same trend is followed by quality assessment criteria. This diversification is the result of technology evolution and of a higher competition between various IT products and service providers.

Automotive is one of those industries that push a lot of technological innovation into people's life. New technology such as active displays, health monitoring, remote access and biometric systems are already part of the projects big players are involved in. Software is essential in all of these. Self-driving and connected cars technologies will revolutionize the auto industry even more profoundly, but navigation maps will remain as important as they are today.

You got that job you wanted: you are a software developer. Just got out of university, with big plans, moved or living in a big city with high prospects in the IT Industry. The world is yours and you. are. trending! There is a lot of hype around you and you know you are in the right place. Passion and coffee gets you up every morning as you devour this new field. Soon some years pass, you learn the methodologies, the process, the way of working. You share your project leaders’ opinions, learn from them, but soon develop your own. Some things they get right, other you can do better. More years pass, you start to develop new abilities that are now not so technology-oriented, but more people-oriented. You start to care about your team's health and your effort to do better is noticed by the company you work for. Soon, you find yourself in a formal or informal leader position and somehow have the satisfaction that you can help others.

BusinessDictionary.com gives us an extremely simple and comprehensive definition: feedback is the process through which the effect of an action is transmitted back (fed-back) with the scope of modifying future actions. In a work environment feedback can be formal, as part of the evaluation process, the objective being the alignment of behaviors and attitudes to the organizational standards of the company where we work, or informal, as one-off reactions to our daily activity (expressed directly or indirectly…). Nothing too complicated so far. But we are only human. And nothing is as simple as a dictionary definition when it’s about people because emotions always get involved. We’ll get to that a bit later.

We talked with our guests about automated and electronic trading challenges, what are the performance requirements and regulations in this area.
Guests:
- Christopher Lederer - Development Manager @ Flow Traders
- Cotyso Bodea - Technical Director @ Tora Trading Services
- Florin Bunău - Technical Expert @ Ullink
Moderator: Ovidiu Mățan - founder @ Today Software Magazine

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I will discuss an example inspired from my current life. I have recently held a workshop about the Agile/Scrum organization of a project. What do these paradigms actually mean? They imply a lot of psychology, from client communication, dividing a project into smaller activities – workable and measurable, to retrospective and progress analysis. As an experiment, you can “steal” parts of Agile/Scrum and implement them at home. Each weekend, you can hold a reunion with the family/partner and talk 30 minutes about one thing you will work on all week. The partner/kids feel involved, and feel that their opinion matters. During this process the people give each other mutual support; they get rationally and emotionally involved.

On the 8th of July 2017, I attended UBB Graduation Days, a public event where local IT companies get the chance to award prizes for graduates' effort. I don’t know how many people are familiar with this event, but I can say that of all the events I attended over the last years, it had the largest dose of ingenuity and passion for technology. This event represents BBU Computer Science students’ work for their BA thesis. Besides enthusiasm and dedication, the demos reflect present-day technologies very well. Many of them featured at least a machine learning component, combining various learning algorithms in order to solve a specific problem.

According to Knuth, Computer Programming as an Art (1974), “premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.” Has the truth behind this statement been changing in the last forty years? Let’s look at some examples in C++, as even today, it is a synonym for performance. Let’s start with a simple function – division by four.

We live in exponential times, as one of those catchy videos circulating on YouTube and Facebook was proudly boasting. And no area of our lives abides to this motto as much and as clearly as the evolution of the processing power available at our fingertips. Moore’s law - and those who toil incessantly to actually keep it relevant - is partially to blame for this, but the real cause is our endless pursuit of progress, our fascination with more, bigger, faster things, all these adjectives we usually associate with better. In this monotonically increasing evolution though, a problem arises when we hit an unsurpassable wall, when we need to decide for instance whether better means faster or more.

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Electronic trading is the daily challenge for execution excellence in trading and risk management, utilizing various technologies with the constant strives to improve; always aiming for perfection. Globalization created global markets that compete for market share, correlations and dependencies between different markets grew as fast as technologies and service agreements could cope with.

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Transactions done by automated systems on electronic markets increased in volume significantly, over the past few years, getting to the point where they are dwarfing the rest on all major exchanges. As an example, the volume of trades made from co-location (systems located in the proximity of the exchange) went up from 10% in 2010 to over 50% in 2016. Naturally, a question arises: "Why is there so much automated trading"? One of the answers might be that investors are optimistic.

Financial Information eXchange protocol is a message layout used to exchange financial information. It was designed for real-time exchange of information related to securities transactions and markets. When it was initially developed, it was intended to automate a communication that was done via phone. The first ever communication via FIX was between Fidelity Investments and Salomon Brothers. One of the reasons for using machine-readable communication was to reduce the amount of errors caused by human factors.