Gemini Solutions group, together with Gemini Foundry Inc, organizes the third edition of the Foundry Conferences, on September 23rd 2014, in Bucharest, having Romain Lavault as a special guest, partner in Partech Ventures. This edition of the event brings to Bucharest a new important investor for the Romanian startups, while during the previous editions we had the opportunity to see Nicolas El Baze, Partech Ventures partner and Romain Niccoli, co-founder and CTO Criteo, one of the most important European startups.

I looked at my watch: 21.15. Outside it’s pitch dark. Autumn is coming. How long is it going to last? Enormously… till spring. For foggy cold days, for those who feel the need to study and perfect, I will bring a new topic to your attention, a topic I haven’t approached yet, JavaFX. My hope is to make this technology appeal to the magazine’s readers, as I consider it truly remarkable. I have written this article together with Diana Balan, Java Developer at Accesa, whom I thank a lot for the ideas and support.

The use of Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) are among the most important web design trends for 2014. It is recommended by W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) since 2003, but it was underused due to partial support on Internet Explorer (IE). But things are changing today…  In my article I will briefly present the SVG concept and discuss the practical benefits of using SVG in web design.

Lately we all have been bombarded with everyone saying that we need to have continuous delivery and that we need to put the application quicker into production. And yes ...why not? Having the application put live into production ten times a day is cool. But then, why did it take us so much time? Continuous delivery was there from the very start of agile. It is in the first principle: “Our highest priority is to satisfy the customer through early and continuous delivery of valuable software.”

The recent boost in online gambling means that there will always be people who will try to bypass or completely avoid regular business behaviour and they will then use this in their advantage. I’m talking mainly about impersonification, taking unfair advantage of promotions, syndicates or just trying to find a leak in the system business flow. Working at Betfair taught me that when you develop broad spectrum applications, you need to put that 10% (or more) extra care in order to secure your application. However, this often proves that it’s not enough and you need to take steps in order to mitigate fraudsters.

Pragmatism, as a term, refers to treating a task in a manner that focuses on the practical aspect of the approach, to maximize efficiency. In the field of programming, this term refers to the “best practices” of programming. These often refer to writing clean code and managing the code in a manner as efficient as possible, to make it easily understandable, by the person that writes the code, and by the people that will read the code in the future. The present article will present a series of ideas, with the purpose of improving the way we write our code, and the way we handle the projects given to us.

In the last article of TSM we discovered the universe of Clean Code written by Robert C. Martin. We had the opportunity to go deeper on the naming topic and see how easily small things like meaningful names or naming that revel intention can improve the quality and readability of the code itself. Today we will dive deeper in Clean Code and we will talk about ‘Functions’. This basic and simple mechanism used to write programs can impact not only how easily a program can be maintained and extended but also the mental health of developers. Don’t forget that long methods will make your eyes bleed.

At this moment there is a variety of web services to which you can hook up to obtain useful data. For example we have the Twitter API for tweets, we have the Instagram API for images or in the particular case of this article, the Foursquare API for venues and locations. Of course you could connect to these, using the out of the box NSURLRequest or a library like AFNetworking, but you would have to write a lot of boiler plate code for parsing and mapping the response JSON. Here comes into role RestKit to help you with some of these things, and I’ll show you just how in the next few lines.

Two international, pretty known, software testing conferences that I participated in were EuroSTAR in 2012 and 2013(in Amsterdam and Gothenburg) and CAST in 2014(in New York). With the experience from CAST still fresh in mind, I reached the conclusion that participating in this sort of events is a good opportunity to have a beneficial experience. When I participate in such an event, the chances are that I am in a perimeter with a high density of people who are passionate about what they do, who like testing, who look for ways of improving their work, and who are open to share their experiences. The interaction with such people is in most cases valuable.

Dear fellow IT colleagues, I have thought many times about what interesting facts I would like to share with you from my professional experience and gladly, the answer was right in my face: depicting some stories about my life as a business analyst perhaps would offer you a priceless insight and support in your present-day work. As all of you can imagine, professional support is always taken into consideration all across the industry. Just by simply searching it on different engines (e.g. Google), the term „business analyst” emphasizes the fact that professionals in this field are in high demand.