In the last year, Apache Spark received a lot of attention in the Big Data and Data Science fields mainly because it has easier, more friendly API and better memory management than MapReduce, so developers could concentrate on the logical operations of the data computation rather than the details of how computation is executed behind.

Robots are already part of our past, present and future. Although mass media is barely covering this, the same, or even less, can be said about the sports played by them. Robot Sumo is such an example.

Within the testing and software development world, there seems to be a confusion about what Quality Assurance, Quality Control, Checking and Testing refer to. I will show you the differences through my eyes and experience.

It seems like a common sense idea: Designers and developers must work together. However, all too often, these individuals work apart while working on the very same project. The designer works to create elements, colour palettes and typography that looks great, while the developer codes and prepares the material for web publishing. This can cause discord between the designer, the web developer and, at the end, the final design itself.

From the development of simple CRUD applications to the development of more complex ones: websites or HTML form management, developers find this type of work to be the most frequent and most challenging of tasks.

Bertrand Meyer was the one who introduced the [distinction between Command and Query terms, when he stated that any method should be either a Query (simply reads information) or a Command (performs an action), but not both.

Building large scale applications is a very rewarding thing. However, the maintenance and scaling process/part of such apps can be quite challenging sometimes. The applications and the operating system can each have different, possible configurations to fit the environment they are deployed in. Moreover, they have to be consistent across the development, the QA and the production stages, and point out to the information relevant at each stage. For example, the information contained in a database URL will be different than that of a URL used in the development stage, which is obviously different than the one used in production. Some of this information is not available for all the people involved in the development process, because they should not care about it either.

It happened so quickly and it was so intense that we barely had the time to experience it properly. The Startup Weekend Cluj - Smart Cities event took place in early April this year and it was fantastic! Hundreds of mails and messages, even more Skype and phone calls, 11 awesome people channeling their efforts towards a common goal – all of these have made it possible. And, of course, we must not forget all our sponsors & partners.

Movidius is a company that develops state-of-the-art technology in Silicon Valley, alongside development centres in Timișoara and Dublin. Established in 2005, Movidius develops cutting-edge technology for media content processing (issued by high resolution video sensors), a technology which uses very little energy and very little space. At present, the company has 90 employees in Timișoara, under Valentin Mureșan’s lead, General Manager and Movidius co-founder.