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.

This paper presents the options available in SAP HANA for text search and analysis. These options relate to the numerous ways in which the HANA platform can be used, especially in business applications, which have not been equipped with these types of functions before. The SAP HANA platform offers the users the possibility to search and visualize the content of the tables with the same simplicity as an Internet search does. The text search function entails a certain tolerance for errors (fuzzy search) as well as the processing of multilingual terms and synonyms. One possible example is filling in the value “buenes eires tele” in a field, and finding the correct value despite the faulty spelling, by searching the value across several columns. Nevertheless, the users cannot always easily determine if the result is the expected one, the correct one, within the fuzzy search context which tolerates errors. Have you ever wondered why you get unexpected results when you search for something on the web?

When you are the lucky owner of a 30 year-old application, the amount of data you are staying on is huge. The database is composed of hundreds of tables, both static and dynamic data. Some might have tens of thousands of records each month. Let’s say that we deal with a distributed application with a classic web application container. Obviously you try to keep up with the emerging technologies and you migrate to new frameworks over and over again with the same goal in mind: “...next time, it will be easier to implement a, b, c..”.

Hello, Ionică. Despite the fact that you are very young, you are a developer who has many achievemnts on GitHub and on StackOverflow. Can you introduce yourself and tell us a couple of words about yourself?

My name is Ionică Bizău (translated in English that would be Johnny B. :smile:). I build things and random stuff. I’m a web developer, and usually, I spend my days in a *nix terminal window, writing code in VIM (the amazing text editor). I also play piano, love science (especially Physics and Maths).

We all make mistakes. Sometimes, they are small with no impact on business continuity, while, other times, they are bigger and can impact the business. A few years ago, I was indirectly involved in a project where a wrong decision resulted in a large amount of money being lost, which impacted the current business and the business continuity. I decided to write this post as a lesson for all of us learn, in order to avoid making the same mistake, especially in this era, where SaaS is the preferred option. It is an era where buying licenses for existing solution is better than developing your own – without analyzing the impact and without considering what should be done if you want to change the provider.