When I arrived to Techsylvania, at the Students’ Arts Center, everybody was still in the break between the panels, though I was a little late. I met some of my online colleagues and we exchanged a few words on the event. They appreciated a lot the quality of the content they had received in the two days and told me that their expectations had been exceeded.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Rohan Chandran on the topic of product management, during the second edition of the event dedicated to entrepreneurship, Techsylvania. The concept described in his presentation within the event is the Minimum Delightful Product, a subtle modification of the well-known concept of Minimum Viable Product, but one which has a great impact.

ACADEMY+PLUS is heading to a new generation of students. A year full of activities grew new talents and also grew the confidence of other stakeholders for the project. This revolutionary learning method for the IT industry, based on program aligned with the market needs, was launched last year in Cluj-Napoca by PITECH+PLUS, after signing a partnership with Ecole 42, from Paris. The main objective of this alternative learning method was to find clever minds that will create tomorrows IT products.

On the 31st issue of the magazine, we introduced the topic of the Internet of Things from the point of view of the Java platform. As we promised, we will continue this discussion presenting the details of creating a Java ME Embedded 8 project. This version represents an important step further, with the adoption of CLDC 8 - which is a subset of Java Standard Edition - and MEEP 8 - a specification which defines a powerful and flexible environment for small embedded systems. Along with these, we have to notice the alignment of the platform we’re talking about to Java SE 8.

We are more and more preoccupied with happiness. And from an organizational point of view, we have become more aware of the importance of having happy employees: these are more productive, more satisfied, and more attached to the organization. Along these lines, we are also seeing an increased effort to satisfy our employees. But how can we make the big leap from a smile to all out organizational happiness?

Long distance relationships can be very successful. Especially in our line of business where companies from two different regions join and each brings a specific quality to the partnership. A relationship, whether personal or business, in-house or nearshore, takes a bit of effort. In order to create good long-lasting partnerships, we apply simple common sense to make sure that everybody is aligned and expectations are clear. Yet these common rules are quite often overlooked.

Like many other things that we use, develop or innovate, I started the NFC journey by searching a solution for a simple problem: remembering to do things before I leave the house, more specifically, remembering to turn off the central heating system or even finding something that could do it for me. Of course then I realised that I had multiple other ideas that would ease my life or make it cool and fun. For example I wanted a way to unlock my phone without any interactions or open my car just by getting closer to the driver’s seat and many other wishes. And then NFC appeared, just like Santa, and made some of them happen.

S is not missing! Nevertheless s, I’m not here to give out ideas to managers on how to reduce recreational office time by cutting down the number of missiles; neither am I here to introduce a single-chance Russian-style version of the well-known game. This is something from our other big brother, namely Don’t-be-evil Google. Thanks to his prominent expertise around web technologies, in October 2011, Aarhus, the city of Bjarne Stroustrup and Lars Bak could witness the birth of another potential revolutionary of the IT industry, as being the place where Dart was first officially unveiled.

It all starts with the passion to succeed… Becoming a good tester does not mean reaching a destination, but rather being on a constant journey into new territories. It is important to build the right skills that will provide us with the understanding of how to approach software testing. These skills help us build credibility and gain the respect of other professionals involved in software development. With a strong foundation of skills we have a better chance of succeeding in what we do: we will be able to provide better quality which leads to better products and in the end, to happier customers and users.