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?

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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.

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!