The first months of 2016 have brought about a series of changes regarding the protection of personal data. This change also affects Romania, an EU (European Union) member state. For this reason, when the organizers of the [IT Camp](https://itcamp.ro/) event (www.itcamp.ro) invited me, for the third year in a row, to Cluj-Napoca, I stopped and pondered on whether I should tackle these issues or not. However, because the IT&C field is many times shrouded by the "dark clouds" of personal data - I mustered all my courage and wrote "The rise of privacy & personal data in the IT business".

For the past few articles we’ve been discussing the challenges that the 2020 human resources and talent crisis will bring to the labor market, both for the employers and the employees. Meanwhile, you’re asking yourselves:

Days after being registered, a company must acquire, from the regional office of the Public Finances Body they belong to, the Unique Control Register. This register includes all the checks done by specialised control bodies in matters of : finances, sanitation, urbanism, quality of construction, consumer protection, work protection, work inspection, fire protection and others.

ClujBike Map started as an experiment on how custom software can improve a process.As the name suggests, the App is a map referring to the bike sharing stations around Cluj. The App is made to improve the user experience. I want to stress out the fact that ClujBike Map is a separate entity from the ClujBike project and it was created only to help it. Moreover, the App is free of charge.

Without exaggerating, we can admit that we are at the beginning of a new trend in IT. For the majority of the companies, duly accomplishing the functional requirements and delivering a high end product obviously have the highest priority. Therefore, most of the complex software systems need to be expanded with new features, new modules respectively, in a simple and effective manner.

Following the KISS principle (Keep It Simple and Stupid) we have to look for the easiest option to implement, whenever we need a quick start for a project. Symfony and Laravel are currently the most popular frameworks. They are both built to encompass the most recent PHP concepts and Object Oriented Programming (OOP).

Ward Cunningham introduced this metaphor, explaining that “shipping code first time code is like going into debt”, and immediately emphasizing that not repaying it very soon “counts as interest on that debt”. The metaphor used here is very powerful, because we can immediately visualise the added interest to the initial debt. The same author remarks, more than 20 years later, that: “The irony of our industry is that code turns out to be ‘harder’ than hardware when it is thought to be finished and the developers dismissed.”

“Know your enemy and know yourself and you can fight a hundred battles without disaster” said Sun Tzu some 2500 years ago. I will not review his “Art of War”. Today I will talk about Agile and its most used flavour these days: Scrum. Is the Scrum/Agile movement the enemy of Software Development Craftsmanship? Is it a creativity killer? What about the team’s productivity?

Software architecture plays a very important role in the delivery of successful software systems, yet it is being neglected by many teams. The software architecture role exists in every team. However, most of the time, the “architecture” reflects wishful thinking rather than reality. Many teams think that they do not need software architects, because they can “self-organize”. Many teams throw around words like “YAGNI”, “evolutionary architecture” and “emergent design”. Being agile has many benefits, but it does not discard the responsibility of having just enough upfront design.

The world we live in today is dominated by technology. You wouldn't be able to walk a couple of meters without noticing someone making use of some sort of technology. Technology has become pervasive and mobile applications are just one small part of this complex system. In order to deliver meaningful features, most mobile applications need some kind of backend system.

At least once in our lifetime, while working in IT, we have read an article or a book where “time management” or “energy management” were mentioned, or at least used a planner to organize, prioritize and plan the tasks. Time management and Energy management are not new concepts, but they still influence our daily lives.

The development lifecycle of software products is driven by the customers’ business needs. Software providers offer specific solutions that match customers’ needs, solutions which are correlated with the instruction level developers have and the technologies available on the market. New technological enhancements determine a quick deterioration rate for products. A product can become obsolete from the point of view of the technology it uses. Even if the business functionality corresponds to customers’ needs, the used technology may no longer reflect current demands.

This study began out of the need to discover the degree of involvement IT Cluj companies show when organising and supporting events for the local IT community. The main IT events in Cluj and the monthly activity of the TSM magazine were taken into account. Cluj is well-represented, at a national level, from the point of view of the events it hosts. Bucharest is the only city which surpass Cluj from this viewpoint. The selection of events took into account the number of participants for each event.

Accidents are unwanted, unpredictable events. However, they are sure to occur from time to time. As a system becomes more and more complex, the probability that it will crash or that the people using it will make mistakes also increases. The way in which we respond to this kind of crises has a major impact on the organizational culture, and on the team and the company’s performance.

The biggest technology event in the region is soon to be started! Techsylvania brings international leaders in investments, innovation and technology to Cluj-Napoca. The event will take place between the 21st and the 24th of May, at the Students’ Culture Hall.

My resume is actually not complete, looking at your question, but this is also not something of interest to me. Doing the things in life that I really like and believe in makes it more manageable. Over the years, I learned that, if you don’t really believe in something, it gets very hard to do that particular thing. This is most likely a formula for failure. Besides that, it is just a matter of working hard and going forward.