Florian Ivan - SCM AC PMI, PMP, Prince2Practitioner and Microsoft MVP - challenges you to 2 days with and about the most famous Agile practices in the world, a training that promises to make you become truly Agile. As a must for professionals in software, Agile is an indispensable tool for the delivery of quality software. Whether the projects relate to product development, software solutions or outsourcing, Agile is widely recognized as a solution that enables the on time delivery at high quality standards, though maintaining the cost constraints.

Many companies are organizing in this period team building activities and managers are talking about what kind of activities are suitable to be used during these events. My purpose in this article is on a more practical approach. I don’t want to insist on defining the concept of team building because people are already used with it, but I would like to mention 7 steps related to how to organize team building activities.

Revenim cu al doilea articol care sintetizează părerile unor reprezentanţi HR din firme IT clujene de marcă, reuniţi în al doilea workshop din cele patru pe care ni le-am propus în anul 2013. Dorim să identificăm practici din sfera resurselor umane, trecute şi prezente, posibil utile pentru procesul de constituire a unei comunităţi mature de IT în zona Clujului. Ne-ar plăcea ca acest demers să fie urmat şi de alte „bresle” profesionale din regiune. Deocamdată credem că industria IT, fiind „pe val”, se poate constitui într-un veritabil model de succes, care să seteze standarde de muncă şi pentru alţii (venituri decente, mediu de lucru incitant, şefi apropiaţi oamenilor). Dar pentru asta mai este puţin de lucru!

Hello, everybody! This is Attila for Today Soft Mag and today I have with me Peter Lawrey. Peter thank you for agreeing to this interview and we will talk about Java performance. Could you please introduce yourself? [Peter] Yes, my name is Peter Lawrey, I am a Java consultant in the low latency space. I have a popular blog called “Vanilla Java” which gets about 120 000 hits / month; I also have a library called Chronicle which is for low latency persistence IPC and data store and also I’m third on StackOverflow for Java.

I think I’ve always been a big fan of lean philosophy. Even back when I didn’t know about it or its name for that matter. And not because it looked fancy but probably because I always knew it felt natural. I must be one of those people who think the world keeps moving even when we’re pausing. Lean is all about movement. It starts with accepting that regardless of your area of practice you cannot stay still. And not because some marketing reason like „competition never sleeps” or tehnical pressure to be up to date. It is in our nature to evolve so we might as well do it in a controlled environment. It is not by accident we call the stillness, lazyness!

The ‘90s have been dominated in Europe by the aftermath of the fall of the iron curtain. Eastern-European markets, which had been marked by the principles of the planned economy, were opened towards capitalism. Then a chaotic increase ensued, which left no industry untouched. Some mammoths, such as metallurgy, steel industry and mining, fall into the category of losers; however, a new species started developing, distinguishing itself among the winners, namely the information technology in general and software development in particular.

A brief review of the previous article (part 1): We were given a “classic” web architecture: an ASP.net MVC 3 & 4 web portal, backed up by a MS SQL database with Entity Framework as a ORM. This architecture had to be prepared for scaling – ported to a system that would allow for a high number of requests to be served.

In the former issues, we discovered the world formed by Hadoop, a world in which 100GB or 500GB files are something ordinary. This allows us to do things we weren’t able to do before. When? The data our company collects can become a gold mine. As we are able to process huge amounts of data, we can visualize the data in a way that was not possible until now.

In the last article we offered a short review of Haskell types, both the existing ones and the ones which can be defined by the programmer. We continue to uncover features of this language in this article by giving a short insight into another type system characteristic: the special way in which polymorphism is implemented in Haskell: typeclasses. Though the notions of class and polymorphism bring into mind the object oriented programming, remember that Haskell is different.

Experience is good as long as you need to solve problems that you already solved once. Experience, unfortunately, is un-good when you’re faced with new problems or you need new solutions. Why? The human mind is simple. This is great as long as you need to act fast and be efficient. We know, however, that today we need more than quick and easy.