A new initiative was launched in Cluj this spring: Seed For Tech is a product development fund, with go-to-market support and seed investment. Through Seed For Tech, we want to help good ideas and talented people reach the next level while contributing to the development of the regional ecosystem of startups and tech products.

The events of the IT domain also brought their contribution to the roaring of cultural and educational events that have enveloped Cluj in the month of May. One of them, the Romanian Testing Camp, reunited a great part of the testers from Cluj in a surprising location, four cinema rooms in a local mall, distinguishing itself especially through the prestige of its guests and the interesting approaches. Another event, IT Camp, invited us to travel inside the fascinating Microsoft world, maintaining in the organization, the unfolding of the event and the selection of guests, the same high standards we were accustomed to during the previous years. For the beginning of the month of June, the TSM recommendation is Techsylania, a conference dedicated to entrepreneurs.

Crowdsourced testing company Global App Testing are set to organise Romania’s first Testathon in Cluj with Betfair. “A Testathon is like a hackathon but specifically for testers”, said Owais Peer, co-founder of Global App Testing. “A lot of our tester community have told us they don't get invited to hackathons, despite it being such an important part of the developer community”. The Testathon is a not-for-profit event aiming to bring together the best testers in the world so they can learn from each other and win prizes whilst trying to break real apps.

As in dating, the designer with a positive attitude will get ahead more easily. Your boss will like you more, your developers won’t run away from you, and your design peers won’t be afraid to ask for your feedback. Be positive, communicative and open minded.

In the case of small and medium-sized enterprises and particularly in the case of start-up companies, the accounting department or the accounting consultants serve as support for the economic and financial decision-making. Therefore, the useful financial-accounting information herein provided will address the accounting issues faced by developers, designers and IT Companies from Cluj-Napoca and elsewhere. For this issue of the magazine, we chose to offer some guidelines on how to access income tax exemptions for developers.

Some legal aspects concerning software applications in general, such as intellectual property and the usage of open source code, collecting personal data through an application, publishing in Google Play, have been analyzed in the previous issues of Today Software Magazine. In the article of the current issue, I would like to focus on the way applications of the SaaS (Software as a Service) type are commercially exploited and, especially, on the partnerships that can help you collect revenues from the usage of these applications.

Analytics will take center stage as the volume of data generated by embedded systems increases and vast pools of structured and unstructured data inside and outside the enterprise are analyzed. Companies will need to manage how to filter the huge amounts of data coming from the IoT, social media and wearable devices, and then deliver exactly the right information to the right person, at the right time. Analytics will become deeply, but invisibly embedded everywhere. Big Data is an important enabler for this trend but the focus needs to shift to thinking about big questions and big answers first and Big Data second — the value is in the answers, not the data.

The article is part of a series dedicated to implementations of patterns in a modern Microservice Architecture based system: Service Discovery, Elasticity, Fault Tolerance, Resiliency, Configuration Management, Monitoring, Centralized Logging, Telemetry. The article presents a technical solution for Service Discovery using Netflix Eureka, a dedicated technology developed in Java and open sourced by Netflix, under the Netflix Open Source Software (OSS) umbrella.

Assume that you’re in a new city (say Genoa, Italy) and have 2 hours until your next train or flight. You see their pay-by-hour bicycle sheds and you’d like to know how far you can bike-to in 1 hour (so that you have time to get back in time) and what sights are within this time range. Or assume that you’re driving to your next meeting and you’d like to know what parking places (paid or street-level) are within 10 minutes, by foot, from their office.

Aspect-oriented programming aims at improving the modularity of software systems, by capturing inherently scattered functionality, often called crosscutting concerns, making the evolution of such systems easier and more manageable. In order to obtain this, AOP adds an extra abstraction mechanism, called an aspect, on top of existing modularization mechanisms such as functions, classes and methods. Aspects allow developers to face up the problems of scattering and tangling by reducing the spread of code belonging to a certain concern over different components.