As you probably know, TheNextWeb rewards the most important startups, entrepreneurs and local investors. On the list of 12 there is also Romania, the event in Bucharest being co-organized by Geekcelerator. Here is a short analysis of the nominees.

f the first part of the article was focused on defining the 7 steps that need to be followed when a team-building is organized, the second part will be oriented on creating a clear understanding of the importance and benefits of a team building program, but also the types of team building activities. As you are already used to, in this number there will also be practical exercises that can be used in creating a team. From my previous experience, most of the team-buildings are organized when the conflict has already arisen.

I have been working in IT, in software outsourcing, for more than 10 years and I have followed the development of this industry from inside it. The financial crisis and the focus on making costs more efficient has lead an increasing number of companies to resort to outsourcing, a trend that favoured the development of this sector. With what consequences? To begin with, it has created a protecting crystal ball around this sector which has continued to grow organically despite the financial crisis and bloomed exactly at a time when other industries were restricting their activity or were vanishing completely. Secondly, it has been accompanied by a larger employment offer, good wages and a Western-level work environment. However, increasing costs has led to the profit margin in the case of outsourcing becoming smaller than what it was 7 to 10 years ago and thus to making room for a stronger cost-based competition coming from India or China.

This review is about a very popular topic nowadays, Android Applications. There are many clients, like mobile devices, which use this platform. The mobile device client is much more as a rich client. We can use mobile devices as thin clients, in a browser, but the purpose of this review is to introduce those programming elements which transform the mobile device in a platform where we can develop and run standalone applications. The next step forward, working with Android, is to develop real rich clients, for enterprise applications: working offline or online, with a backend module running on a middleware. This part is not included in this review.

n a perfect world I would except to be able to run a load test or a stress test using a cloud provider without being forced to change any line code from my tests. In this article we will find out how to do this thing using the new cloud service. How will a person without knowledge of cloud be able to run a load test with 50.000 users for 24 hours with minim costs, without being obliged to purchase and configure 10, 20 nodes

At the end of the latest issue we managed to write a basic application allowing information retrieval from 3 tables containing data about individuals (data being presented as a list of pairs). Starting from that code (which will be presented here as well) we’ll build the application of this article.

In the previous articles we discussed about why we chose Windows Azure over other alternatives as a scaling platform and about the database migration progress to SQL Azure. In this article we will close the series by presenting how we migrated the web portal from a local IIS to the Azure cloud.

Each programmer tries to be as organized as possible when it comes to writing code. Each team organizes the project so that it will be easy to maintain and understand by the new members in the team. This can be the result of the use of design patterns. We know that there are a lot of code organizing rules like these and that once we choose one of them it is very difficult and costly to change. However, it is important for the programmers to be up to date when it comes to these design patterns in order to have a maximum benefit from using them.

“It’s complex.”
“No, it’s not complex.”
“Oh, yes, it is, ‘cause we have 12 systems to interconnect, all developed on different platforms. Plus, we are using a technology that’s new to us…”
“So, it’s a complicated project, not a complex one.”

The software craftsmanship movement promotes the idea that the only way a developer can be fast is by behaving rationally during crisis periods. This way of thinking is a reaction to the behaviour of writing code that is hard to change and to understand, basically producing technical debt, in the moment when you need to deliver software during a short period of time. The way the software craftsmanship movement believes that a developer can become that fast is by practicing as often as possible, in most diverse environments, on platforms and languages as different as possible. Thus deliberate practice is very tightly related with any developer that calls themselves “aspiring software craftsman” or “software craftsman”.