Facebook, Google or Flickr have the possibility to introduce in production up to 10 new versions of product per day, in a way that is transparent to the users. In the heterogeneous and agile world of the IT industry, the development of applications and services becomes a challenge due to the diversity of technologies and products, as well as due to their number. Likewise, in the big software companies where there are Development, Testing and IT departments involved in the developing process there is the need of close collaboration. To insure efficiency, the collaboration is realized by standard processes and products which, because of the diversity of the processes and products used, becomes an objective that is difficult to attain.

An overview of the social and professional actuality reveals a rather exponential trend, especially in the last twenty years, which makes our today’s standards and benefits higher and higher. Beyond obvious evolution, the dynamics and magnitude of these events have led to take place an important, but yet subtle, change of emphasis positioning: the achievements do matter, but more than that, today, it matters most the further options you have. If there are other areas where this is less true, in IT this conclusion is real and representative.

The requirements imposed by the standards in the field make developing safety-critical software be a continuous challenge for everyone involved in the process. The SCADE development environment prescribes many of these rules right from the beginning of the project. Built on top of a synchronous language, having a deterministic approach, bundled with a certified C code generator and a set of tools to help with testing and verifying the product, SCADE lets us focus on implementing the high level requirements and saves us from worrying about the basic mistakes.

We all heard about trends. We have trends in music, fashion and of course in IT. For 2013 there were announced some trends that are already part of our lives. Who didn’t hear about cloud, machine to machine (M2M) or NoSQL. All these trends have entered in our lives as part of our ordinary day. Big Data is a trend that existed last year and it remained one of the strongest one.

Alan Perlis once said A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing. Judging by the number of Stack Overflow questions and the impressive number of articles and posts on reddit, Slashdot or blogs, it is clear that the Haskell language deserves to be known. In fact, functional programming is indeed a domain which every hacker should be accustomed with.

The book which I submit for review this edition of TSM, entitled „RESTful Web Services Cookbook” by Subbu Allamaraju, Yahoo architect, is part of a special category. This book presents a complete guide to writing and consuming REST web services in a manner independent of programming language. This is a big challenge. Regarding the new concepts introduced, the book is a comprehensive material and the challenge results in finding the limits of a particular programming environment.

A lot of people want a kind of Silicon Valley in Cluj, with innovative and creative companies. IT Cluster aims a similar goal. In a four articles series, Danis Consulting aims to analyse these companies from Human Resources perspective, how they evolved, their problems and, the most important, how they can constitute a real community to be proud about.

Unlike the other articles published in the previous issues, this one will have several parts. The first part offers a definition of performance management and process and the tools used for its implementation. In a dynamic environment in which companies put more and more emphasis on employee development, every organization around the globe tried defining those elements that contribute to the creation of a successful organizational environment.

A lot of people I talked to recently talked about a wish to do something, unfortunately it remains a lot of the time just a wish. We each have a “I wanna work out”, “I want to read more”, “I want to eat healthier”, “I want to wake up earlier” and so on … We really, really wish for those things, we wish to start them, we wish to keep at them, we are really motivated but even so … nothing happens.

Imagine Cup is an annual competition hosted by Microsoft to promote innovation and their technologies. Teams of up to four students, in the timespan of one year, take the challenge of writing an application that would support the Millennium Development Goals. This year however, the theme requirements were removed, giving us the freedom of making a fun game that didn’t have the responsibility of ending world hunger. I postponed participating to Imagine Cup since my first year in university. I used to tell myself “Maybe next year I’ll find a fun idea and hone my skills. I’ll try next year”. But this was the start of my third year, and with only two years until graduation, I didn’t have many „next years” left. I had to do something.