You know that type of person who is so into something that it becomes contagious? Well, Cristina is just like that. She's 28 years old, she's from Chisinau and for about 6 months now since I met her (at JCI Cluj and also as a workmate), she keeps talking enthusiastically about bicycles.

Cluj-Napoca, Romania. YAPC::EU, the most important conference dedicated to the Perl programming language will take place this year in Cluj-Napoca, between the 24th and the 26th of August. The event, a premiere for the Romanian IT landscape, is organized by Cluj.pm, the local Perl community and will be hosted by UMF - "Iuliu Hațieganu".

We had the opportunity to speak with Mr. Eddy Vermeire, CEO @ ISDC, about the recent merge with Endava.

Both iSDC and Endava are international companies with development centers in Cluj. It was a surprise the recent fusion between both companies. What did determine this change and what opportunities do you see here ?

There was a private equity stake in ISDC, which was keen to sell during 2016, so the ISDC board made sure they found a suitable buyer. Endava's cultural alignment, growth ambitions and track record made it the outstanding candidate to provide a secure and exciting future for our people. Similarly, for Endava, ISDC represents an ideal match providing real engineering expertise and quality, further strength in financial services and an opportunity to expand its presence selling in Europe as well as the delivery centres in Romania and Bulgaria.

Users expect mobile apps to be valuable, elegant, and useful, among other things. User experience is emotional and is driven by how users think, perceive, and feel. Most importantly, users expect mobile apps to work seamlessly, regardless of their choice of technology, their location, or context. A good user experience is essential to achieving our business goals, whether it is transforming our customers' experience, increasing workforce productivity, or growing revenues.

Nowadays, Microsoft is opening more and more data centers around the globe. Regions like Japan, the UK (to be announced), Brasil, Germany, Korea are already in-place or will soon be in-place. These specific countries have laws requiring that specific industry or data does not leave the country. In the health-care industry, especially, it is common to have restrictions preventing patient-related information to leave the country at any time. Similar laws exist for other industries like banking or data protection. In this context, we need to be aware of these laws, of the solutions we come up with and of what actually happens with the content that is transmitted between Azure Regions and on-premises systems.

This year, in May, I attended the Spring I/O conference in Barcelona where I heard about Spring REST docs. Two things drew my attention:
- Documentation is generated from unit tests
- Tests fail if documentation is not done properly
After the conference, I checked out Spring REST docs reference and I created a sample REST service to see it in practice. The code is very simple and it is the classic Hello World.

According to the new Fiscal Code, entrepreneurs benefit from a wider scope regarding the items which they purchase and which fall under the tax relief law for the reinvested profit. In other words, entrepreneurs have the possibility to reduce the amount of profit tax by investing it in IT equipment: hardware and software. In the following lines, we will explain which are the new legal changes and we will present three examples of tax calculation that can be exempt from the reinvested profit.

We constantly hear this statement. It is due to the fact that meetings take up most of our time throughout the day. We often schedule and attend meetings whenever we want to plan or take action. Having a lot of these rendezvous, company meetings have become one of the most common time thieves which have a negative impact on our productivity. If we add the 69% of the people who consider meetings inefficient and the 9% of those who literally fall asleep at meetings, we can conclude that these types of encounters have a major impact on the overall performance in the workplace environment.

The last Magic Quadrant that Gartner issued last year shows that Amazon Web Services maintains its “king of IaaS services” position, despite the strong competition from Microsoft’s Azure Platform and Google’s Cloud Platform. The three companies mentioned above are members of the “hyper-scale vendors” category.

When it comes to a commercial IT solution, in the case of bespoke software development, it is not always obvious what your customer’s primary concern is and what the critical capabilities needed to construct the solution are. These two factors are the key enablers for closing the deal and should be understood. This is the very point where the shaping is initiated, having as the ultimate goal to satisfy the customer needs, culture and traditions. By working vice versa, from the commercial viability to the solution, chances are that the options proposed are sub-optimal or, even if some part are good, the overall is still below customer expectations. This article explores a way to shape IT solutions that are welcomed by clients.