If you'd live in a world where your opinions matter, would you try to make a change? Without any doubt opinions are a constant presence in our day to day lives: suggestions, reviews, these are only a few of so many different ways to influence future decisions. In this era, when the multitude of options are choking you, opinions are the ones that can help you make a quick decision under the spotlight. But lets assume that we can evaluate everything by pros and cons, would our decisions be correct? Is it actually that simple?

The world of software development has a lot of flavours and software developers prefer different flavours. In the world of Internet of Things (IoT) one the most important flavour is the one of SENSING. By adding a MOBILE flavour to any IoT product the solution becomes a very pleasant one. Even though sensing and mobile would be very enjoyable for the general users it is hard to find developers that would like both flavours. On one side we have volts, amperes, sensors, actuators and on the other side we have views, icons, lifecycles, uEx. Sensoriada creates a framework and defines a context that tries to fill the gap between these flavours with the only purpose of creating better applications and in the same time to allow developers to work with their favourite flavour.

After being in the software industry for more than 9 years now I've pretty much done a little bit of everything. I was an intern that did testing in order to learn how to code, I was a software developer in a small firm and I did everything from the ground up, including database development, and now I am a QA engineer at Betfair. In my current role I am involved in functional testing with an emphasis on automation, continuous delivery and performance testing. When I started thinking about studying software development I never imagined what my path would be. But all the things that I've done have helped me become good at what I do now.

Software design is all the rage now. It looks like every year a few more design ideas appear. First there were the GoF design patterns. Now, MVC is the way to do web applications, while ideas like: domain driven design, ports and adapters, microservices see increase interest and adoption. I learned software design by doing, with a mentor who kept giving me very useful (and sometimes annoying) feedback. This was before I knew about design patterns, SOLID principles or TDD. Therefore, my understanding of design starts from the core laws of software design. That's why, when my colleagues or I work with developers, we teach them not only design patterns and SOLID principles, but also a way to think about design. Here are 4 ideas you should consider when you make a design decision (that is, every time you write a function, class or module) to get better software design:

It’s really amazing how much the role of technology has increased in the past 10 years. Nowadays, technology promises to bring an answer to many of our questions. If you ask yourself why, the answer is pretty obvious: we live in an age where we have to deal with and work with a huge quantity of data and the results must be fast and very accurate. The medical field is not an exception. Doctors and researchers start turning to technology for solutions in improving or replacing existing procedures. From blood analysis to brain surgery, everything is supervised and guided by software products or hardware devices specially created for this purpose.

With the appearance of the WatchKit SDK a lot of iOS developers started experimenting with it and writing articles about the challenges faced during development. Following this trend, in this article we describe our first impression after tackling the WatchKit SDK head-on and the technical challenges encountered while creating a navigation enabled watch app using our Scout SDK .

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For those who are not yet familiar with this concept, Startup Weekend (SW) is an event that brings together entrepreneurs, graphic designers, developers, marketers and other bright people with smart business ideas. But for those who already know what it’s about, we invite you to our next edition, which will take place during the weekend 24th – 26th of April 2015. Startup Weekend is a concept that was created in USA and exported all around the world. Its main goals are education and personal development. The organizers provide you the context, resources, mentors, and most important, the opportunity to meet new people that are also eager to create a startup.

On February 6th 2012, the first issue of Today Software Magazine was released. I remember how, on the launching of the magazine, together with my colleagues from Gemini Solutions, we tried to draw a list of all our acquaintances from the IT domain. We managed to bring together twenty people, thus setting up the first release event. Back then, we did not think about presenting articles, we simply had a chat and gave the magazine away to the participants. Since then, this project has been through several transformations and collaborations in order to reach today's form.

A few months ago, I participated in the Berlin Scrum Gathering organized by Scrum Alliance, where I discovered that there are many organizations which dedicate a lot of time to mentality change. They have adopted an agile mindset as an answer to a fast changing environment, with fast changing customer needs, in which a few lost moments can result in a lot of unnecessary work. When we talk about Agile, we talk about a mindset, about being able to react in time to change, about a group of methodologies based on incremental, iterative development and about close cooperation between team members with cross functional expertise.

Following the article in the previous issue, we bring to your attention the creation of REST web services which interact with persistent data. To start with, we offer you an introduction into JAXB. Java Architecture for XML Binding is a Java standard which defines the way in which the Java objects are converted into and from XML. It uses a collection of standard mappings and defines an API for the reading and writing of Java objects in and from XML.