Being a Team Leader (at any level / function / department / industry) can be a challenging role. You constantly have to balance performance and requirements from management above, deal with employees, plan, manage, motivate, track, appraise performance, train, develop, sometimes hire or even deal with clients. It is certainly a complex role, and it can sometimes be difficult and exhausting. But it shouldn’t be! Let us see what we can do to make it easier and more effective, especially focusing on leading millennials (born between 1980 and 2000, give or take).

Nowadays, one of the biggest problems, most companies have to deal with, regards the way in which they integrate data from various sources, and then process and expose it, to satisfy business needs and get the necessary information to make the right decisions for improving existing products. Yet, many companies are not aware of the benefits of data integration tools. Using such a tool is not uncommon at all. It is rather a MUST.

The first months of 2016 have brought about a series of changes regarding the protection of personal data. This change also affects Romania, an EU (European Union) member state. For this reason, when the organizers of the [IT Camp](https://itcamp.ro/) event (www.itcamp.ro) invited me, for the third year in a row, to Cluj-Napoca, I stopped and pondered on whether I should tackle these issues or not. However, because the IT&C field is many times shrouded by the "dark clouds" of personal data - I mustered all my courage and wrote "The rise of privacy & personal data in the IT business".

For the past few articles we’ve been discussing the challenges that the 2020 human resources and talent crisis will bring to the labor market, both for the employers and the employees. Meanwhile, you’re asking yourselves:

Days after being registered, a company must acquire, from the regional office of the Public Finances Body they belong to, the Unique Control Register. This register includes all the checks done by specialised control bodies in matters of : finances, sanitation, urbanism, quality of construction, consumer protection, work protection, work inspection, fire protection and others.

ClujBike Map started as an experiment on how custom software can improve a process.As the name suggests, the App is a map referring to the bike sharing stations around Cluj. The App is made to improve the user experience. I want to stress out the fact that ClujBike Map is a separate entity from the ClujBike project and it was created only to help it. Moreover, the App is free of charge.

Without exaggerating, we can admit that we are at the beginning of a new trend in IT. For the majority of the companies, duly accomplishing the functional requirements and delivering a high end product obviously have the highest priority. Therefore, most of the complex software systems need to be expanded with new features, new modules respectively, in a simple and effective manner.

Following the KISS principle (Keep It Simple and Stupid) we have to look for the easiest option to implement, whenever we need a quick start for a project. Symfony and Laravel are currently the most popular frameworks. They are both built to encompass the most recent PHP concepts and Object Oriented Programming (OOP).

Ward Cunningham introduced this metaphor, explaining that “shipping code first time code is like going into debt”, and immediately emphasizing that not repaying it very soon “counts as interest on that debt”. The metaphor used here is very powerful, because we can immediately visualise the added interest to the initial debt. The same author remarks, more than 20 years later, that: “The irony of our industry is that code turns out to be ‘harder’ than hardware when it is thought to be finished and the developers dismissed.”

“Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster” said Sun Tzu some 2500 years ago. I will not review his “Art of War”. Today I will talk about Agile and its most used flavour these days: Scrum. Is the Scrum/Agile movement the enemy of Software Development Craftsmanship? Is it a creativity killer? What about the team’s productivity?