About Cluj IT Days 2014 purpose and goals, the most relevant is to have a look at the organizers view. As Eng. Ovidiu Mățan states in the forewrod of Cluj IT Days’ conference book „the stake of this book [and conference A/N] is to provide an image on the essentials of the entrepreneurial ecosystem: the accumulated experience in developing products, the innovation within the reserach projects and the execution from a technical and managerial perspective.”

Cluj IT Days’ agenda was structured in 3 main chapters: trends and leadership, startups and entrepreneurship and technical insight. The two days event hosted 2 international speakers, more than 3 trend setter CEOs of Cluj IT companies, about 5 local research projects, 8 startup pitches, more than 15  technical presentations and about 220 participants. Cluj IT Days’s magic spell is the involvement of the special community built around Today Software Magazine. Providing the place for specialized talks across the year, the magazine is proud to have a constantly growing mind pool and hard trained brain muscles.

Discussions on the latest updates in software development management, programming laguages, software architecture, testing and best practices steadily prepared the way for exciting presentations of the latest researches and their innovations. The issue of constant learning in ICT  and the best ways to approach it was also brought to the audience’s attention.

Two workshops on the 24th of November precedeed the actual Cluj IT Days 2014 conference:

-Java performance workshop with the following agenda: Improving performance by reducing allocation rate with examples; Real World usage of Java 8 Lambdas and Optional, Patterns and Anti-patterns; Lambdas, under the bonnet; How do they really work and how do you debug/profile them?; Low level Java programming, how to make using Unsafe safer?; Faster logging and persisted messaging with Chronicle Queue; Storing and persisting more data with off heap collections.

-Creativity, Agile and Software Craftmanship Workshop with the main themes: Pre-Sales Release planning and Estimations in an Agile environment; Creativity Workshop; Architectural Kata.

Codespring contributed to Cluj IT Days 2014 event with a speech delivered by our marketing head – Diana Ciorba – in the Trends & Leadership session, elegantly opening the doors for debating the situation of female leadership in the ITC sector, particularly in sofware engineering. With a suggestive title „Women in Software: The Edge of the Privilege” and a genuine presence, Diana conveyed to the audience the idea of encouraging diversity, building the attractivenes for the sector and adjusting the career path for female engineers.

Secondly, the article „Looking Through the Eyes of the End User” authored by Diana for the conference book, reveals Codespring’s focus on the user while building a software product and provides insights on the fine-tuning principle which guides the company’s processes and business approach. It articulates 10 key aspects that should be considered by a team that is willing to develop a high performance – high desirability software product and brings in the spotlight the business thinking behind it.

With each project Cluj IT community consolidates its position on the Romanian and European technology landscape. Cluj IT Days 2014 highlighted another essential trait of Cluj IT community: the concern for building own software products and the growing resources for reaserach and innovation.