The 2013 edition of the IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC) took place in Mexico, Cancun – a rather exotic setting for us Europeans. Along with the pleasant location it is also worth mentioning that CEC is one of the biggest and most important conferences, its main topic being evolutionary computation – which gives the enthusiasts in the field of evolutionary computation, such as myself, at least two reasons to participate in this event.

I have chosen two historical figures, in an attempt to offer a solution to one of the current challenges with Cluj IT: the big gap between the high demand and low offering of human resources. Starting with Henry Ford, the man responsible for the invention of the assembly line, but also a few revolutionary HR policies for their time. Like any business owner, he first tried to boost productivity by improving the manufacturing process. In a relatively new industry (Ford started his company in 1906, 17 years after Karl Benz patented his engine), through the invention of the mobile assembly line and the concept of mass production, Ford optimized the manufacturing time of one automobile from 12 and a half hour to just one hour and 33 minutes.

The annual conference organized by RTC (Romanian Testing Community) has grown, since the previous edition, in what matters most: content. From three to ten speakers, from one day with three sessions to two days, the first with two parallel four session tracks, and the second dedicated to two workshops held by Paul Gerrard and Andy Harding. This year the same number of participants have received five times more content. But the exchange on information was not limited to the scheduled talks. The strong point of the conference was the warm atmosphere and the speakers’ interactivity. Each break was filled with open discussions, most of them evolving in long private sessions that stretched to the next break.

There is more and more talk about the need for Romanian software companies to pass from outsourcing to developing their own products. No one knows for how long the services of local soft companies will be chosen to the detriment of other companies. For the moment, what gives us an advantage is the low price and high quality of soft services.

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”.

Since after the publication of our previous articles on SAP-related technologies, readers have suggested that a short introduction into the SAP environment would be very welcome, we have decided to take the advice and start a series of articles that will provide some insights into the SAP world. Consequently, in this article we start off by analyzing several aspects of the SAP products and technologies, answering questions such as: Who or what is SAP? What solutions does SAP provide? What is different about SAP technologies and what does software development in the SAP environment imply?

When it comes to .Net family of client applications, Windows Presentation Foundation is a name that is frequently found. WPF is no longer a novelty, being introduced from. Net Framework 3.0 but brings out graphical interface advantages that still make it competitive. The temptation whenever there’s something new, is to make it the ideal solution for everything. There is an ongoing discussion when it comes to choosing a Microsoft client technology, but if you don’t use the advantages brought by WPF (data-binding, dynamic styling, media services, animations) for performance reasons a lot of developers still choose WinForms.

In this article we continue to give the account of ICT Spring Europe, which I had the pleasure to take part in, together with my colleague Marius Mornea. It was the first TSM delegation abroad and we had the opportunity to connect to the pulse of the European IT world. The future looks good and it wouldn’t surprise me to assist to a redefinition of the old continent’s importance in the development of tomorrow’s applications.