I’ve been wondering lately what it means to create/deliver a successful mobile app. Competition in the app business today is so fierce, you have to develop/deliver no less than the possible best and most fluid app ever to stay in the game. I’ve been a SQA engineer in the mobile world for 4 years now, so for me delivering great apps is really important. Since you won’t find a recipe for success in just one article I’m going to share with you my findings and personal experiences, to help you build your best app yet.

It’s spring… the time of changes and hope… Oracle contributes to all that with a new version of the standard Java platform. I am talking about version 8, released in March 2014. Beginning with the current issue of Today Software Magazine, I wish to change the type of articles that I write. I cannot say I abandon the idea of book reviews, which represent an important way of putting forth some valuable books from the IT library, but I will also add some articles of a higher technical degree. By doing this, I hope the readers of the magazine will be incited to discover what is new and performant in the world of software applications development.

After so many nerves lost over all the quirks and twists and turns of C++ with OpenGL and MFC, working with C# or Java was like a breath of fresh air. But on a day of Irish rain and wind, in a dim cubicle in a corner of an office, along came Qt and a wonderful C++ world opened up, with new revelations ever since. After moving over to Qt, working with C++ became a joy again, and it is one of the environments I most dearly work in. Development is quite an experience, everything remaining native, fast and easily maintainable in the same time.

If you don’t have APIs you don’t exist. Well, to be fair, it would be more correct to say that without APIs you don’t exist in the cloud, but then again, can you exist outside the cloud nowadays? You must be thinking: nice compilation of buzzwords to start an article. Thank you! I hope the rest of the article will be equally compelling or less repulsive, depending on your taste for buzzwords.

In this article, which is split into multiple parts, I’m going to address the issue of keeping your Linux servers up to date. More often than not, when starting to administer the servers of a startup business, the systems administration team finds an already created datacenter setup around a bunch of servers installed with the needed software, which is often a chaotically configured, “barely functioning” setup done by the first team of developers, doing DevOps jobs.

When someone says “data modeling”, everyone thinks automatically to relational databases, to the process of normalizing the data, to the 3rd normal form etc.; and that is a good practice, it also means that the semesters studying databases paid off and affected your way of thinking and working with data. However, ever since college, things have changed, we do not hear so much about relational databases, although they are still used with predominance in applications. Nowadays, “big data” is in trend, but it is also a situation when more and more applications need to handle: the volume, the velocity, the variety, and the complexity of the data (according to Gartner’s definition).

The word Kata comes from martial arts: it is the Japanese translation of the word form. Kata is used to describe detailed, choreographed patterns of movement that can be practiced either alone or in pairs. It can also describe other actions from martial arts like: training, highly detailed simulated combats, and others.

Requirement elicitation is commonly mentioned among business analysts, but where do these requirements originally come from? It is quite complicated to understand and start collecting the required functionality as the product stakeholders’ explanations are often ambiguous, diverse and lacking of technical terminology. But how do you manage to identify and write down all the functionalities required by the stakeholders, the user roles and their actions? The answer is pretty simple – you have to perform a use case analysis in order to capture the contracts between the system and its users and then refine the system’s use cases and obtain an organized and more complete view.

The natural career of a software developer is: junior programmer, senior programmer, technical lead / team leader, optionally architect and then it turns into management. There’s something paradoxical about this path: the career that started with writing code ends in not writing code at all anymore. After all, how can you keep up with all the new and shiny stuff that appears in technology each year? A new type of career has surfaced in the recent years, one that’s much more interesting. We will look in this article at people who don’t fit this profile, at those developers who still write code and can help others even if they are 40, 50 or 60 years old. Robert C. Martin. Michael Feathers. Rebecca Wirfs-Brock. How are they different? How can they keep up with changes?

Or the moment when trend beats logic. A while ago one colleague of mine wrote a very interesting article about best practices on Agile methodologies. If looking at the title you would expect a set of rules which would allow you to be the best Agile person on the planet, we pleasantly discover that in real life these rules are actual guidelines and adaptations to thousands of different situations. This article made me a little more aware of the next situation: how many times did you actually hear somebody saying: “On my project we implement Scrum 100%”. It’s like somebody would say “I have a perfect life”. It happens only from time to time and not on Earth.