If you happen to pass by Betfair’s office in October, there are high chances you’ll hear everybody talking about FedEx Day. You don’t really know what to expect. Are we ordering something? Is this some kind of special delivery that everybody’s excited about? Are we getting something cool? Besides, if you’re a manager it looks bad not to have the tiniest clue of what’s going on. But I’m freaking out for no good reason. Just when I could picture the FedEx van in front of the office, things start to get clearer.

Something more than the overall perspective, farthest from the barrier of any conventional solution, beyond the individual knowledge, regardless of the time frames and against mainstream. You are the one who lets your curiosity reign beyond any known limits. The one to whom details make a difference. The one who, through experimentation and exploration, decants its experience and further shares it with others, thus by setting even higher milestones for himself from which resumes its learning. You are the one who is the pedagogue, the autodidact, pursuing innovation and stating your initiatives; the one who doesn’t have boundaries in your evolution. You are the one that always goes further.

Software development is a creative industry. We hear this statement frequently and, in time, even find ourselves repeating it. We accept its obvious truth but expend less thought on what it actually means. Ask any aspiring IT professional who gives a damn about his personal development what kind of work environment he’s looking for. Sometimes you’ll get a direct creative environment while at other times you’ll hear about wanting to have my ideas taken into account or work on diverse and challenging projects. They all mean the same thing. People who work in IT need an outlet to express themselves. They thrive on challenge and overcoming barriers, real or imagined, personal or external.

I have experimented with Haskell various exercises for my curiosity and for learning purposes. I consider myself an old-school statistician, an R programmer and sometimes Python. I am interested in statistics and data analysis, in concepts and new paradigms such as NoSQL, Big Data, MapReduce or functional programming. Note to readers: this is not an introductory book for Haskell or functional programming but rather the author assumes that the reader is familiar with the syntax and system of types of Haskell - which is significantly different from other programming languages. There are functional programming concepts, such as monad or purity, frequently used in the book.

In the past years, we could notice major changes of the fundamental concepts software development relies on: a faster pace of innovation and releases, the focus on cross-device development strategies and the collaboration within the community of developers that is based more and more on open source. In addition to this, there is an increasing need for developers to maintain older applications up to date and to integrate easily new technologies within them. Microsoft tried to find an answer for all these demands by establishing a new trend of its well-known framework .NET, a trend that is referred to as vNext.

This month, too, we bring to your attention some technical challenges of the JavaFX world. In the second article we will discuss about concurrency and data binding. The javafx.concurrent package manages the multithread code of the interaction with the UI and ensures that this interaction takes place in the correct thread. The package consists of the Worker interface and two basic classes, Task and Service, both of them implementing the Worker interface.

Http has been around since 1999, but the modern web applications‘ increasing demand for server push and a more efficient communication protocol, led to the definition of the Websocket protocol in 2011. The questions asked at the Java Conference 2014 in Cluj were symptomatic for the new technologies: Who heard about Websockets? Nearly everyone of the ~250 participants. Who already used Websockets? Just a bunch of people, around 10 to 15. Finally, who used Websockets in a commercial project? As expected, no one raised the hand.

In the last two numbers of TSM we discovered what kind of naming we should use for our methods, fields, classes and so on. Related to this we saw we should always use meaningful names that are related to the problem that we want to solve. Also, we saw that a method name should always express an action (start with a verb) and a class name should be always a noun (or to express a noun). After this, we talked about function, where we found out that a function should be short, do only one thing and the number of parameters should be limited. All the information from this series is inspired from “Clean Code”, written by Robert C. Martin. I hope that in this way I will be able to make people read this book and write better code.

Software Testing World Cup is an international software testing competition, now in its second year. The competition takes place in two stages: the continental preliminaries (Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, South America and Oceania) where anyone can sign up, and the world finals which take place during the Agile Testing Days conference in Berlin. This year the preliminaries where held between April and July and the finals will take place mid-November. Irina was the first one to hear about the competition and we all ventured into the idea quickly. None of us had ever participated in a testing competition and we gladly took on the challenge as it sounded so fun and exciting, a good personal and team experience. So, on June 13, 2014 we, Irina, Ileana, Sanda and Lavinia, took part in this unusual contest, where software testing teams around Europe had to test an application for 3 hours.

As I mentioned in the article called “Business Analysis Framework” of the 26th issue of the magazine, I will continue the series of articles in this area. The topics of my future articles were concisely presented in the form of steps and diagrams in order to provide a consistent overall view both for a business analyst as well as for any other member of the team who fulfils these responsibilities. Within the same article I was mentioning orientation as the first step that a business analyst should take when starting a new project.