Since we were little, we were told to search for success in all things that we do because this search will guarantee us happiness. So, how come we don’t notice an explosion of happiness amongst employees who established themselves as being successful? (employees who earn more than 75.000$/per year). We came to realize that having a successful career along with a care-free life, doesn’t necessarily lead towards the ideals of happiness.

What is a stereotype? A stereotype is a concept that puts a limit on reality. Stereotyping is represented as a negative paradigm, often present in the context of short-term decisions without a broad vision of the future. Corporations, generally those working in the IT field, have well-defined processes as a result of many years of analysis and testing of various techniques. Processes within a business are typically divided into three categories: primary, support, and management processes.

The quality of software products is becoming higher and higher and the same trend is followed by quality assessment criteria. This diversification is the result of technology evolution and of a higher competition between various IT products and service providers.

Automotive is one of those industries that push a lot of technological innovation into people's life. New technology such as active displays, health monitoring, remote access and biometric systems are already part of the projects big players are involved in. Software is essential in all of these. Self-driving and connected cars technologies will revolutionize the auto industry even more profoundly, but navigation maps will remain as important as they are today.

You got that job you wanted: you are a software developer. Just got out of university, with big plans, moved or living in a big city with high prospects in the IT Industry. The world is yours and you. are. trending! There is a lot of hype around you and you know you are in the right place. Passion and coffee gets you up every morning as you devour this new field. Soon some years pass, you learn the methodologies, the process, the way of working. You share your project leaders’ opinions, learn from them, but soon develop your own. Some things they get right, other you can do better. More years pass, you start to develop new abilities that are now not so technology-oriented, but more people-oriented. You start to care about your team's health and your effort to do better is noticed by the company you work for. Soon, you find yourself in a formal or informal leader position and somehow have the satisfaction that you can help others.

BusinessDictionary.com gives us an extremely simple and comprehensive definition: feedback is the process through which the effect of an action is transmitted back (fed-back) with the scope of modifying future actions. In a work environment feedback can be formal, as part of the evaluation process, the objective being the alignment of behaviors and attitudes to the organizational standards of the company where we work, or informal, as one-off reactions to our daily activity (expressed directly or indirectly…). Nothing too complicated so far. But we are only human. And nothing is as simple as a dictionary definition when it’s about people because emotions always get involved. We’ll get to that a bit later.

We talked with our guests about automated and electronic trading challenges, what are the performance requirements and regulations in this area.
Guests:
- Christopher Lederer - Development Manager @ Flow Traders
- Cotyso Bodea - Technical Director @ Tora Trading Services
- Florin Bunău - Technical Expert @ Ullink
Moderator: Ovidiu Mățan - founder @ Today Software Magazine

Published in Issue 61 Read more

I will discuss an example inspired from my current life. I have recently held a workshop about the Agile/Scrum organization of a project. What do these paradigms actually mean? They imply a lot of psychology, from client communication, dividing a project into smaller activities – workable and measurable, to retrospective and progress analysis. As an experiment, you can “steal” parts of Agile/Scrum and implement them at home. Each weekend, you can hold a reunion with the family/partner and talk 30 minutes about one thing you will work on all week. The partner/kids feel involved, and feel that their opinion matters. During this process the people give each other mutual support; they get rationally and emotionally involved.

On the 8th of July 2017, I attended UBB Graduation Days, a public event where local IT companies get the chance to award prizes for graduates' effort. I don’t know how many people are familiar with this event, but I can say that of all the events I attended over the last years, it had the largest dose of ingenuity and passion for technology. This event represents BBU Computer Science students’ work for their BA thesis. Besides enthusiasm and dedication, the demos reflect present-day technologies very well. Many of them featured at least a machine learning component, combining various learning algorithms in order to solve a specific problem.

According to Knuth, Computer Programming as an Art (1974), “premature optimization is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming.” Has the truth behind this statement been changing in the last forty years? Let’s look at some examples in C++, as even today, it is a synonym for performance. Let’s start with a simple function – division by four.