Posts in Category: clouders

Graduation Papers In The Cloud

The other day, during a team meeting, someone brought up the issue of tools that make students’ lives easier than it was years ago. I was stunned to learn that I can be the “esteemed” author a of a scientific paper in a matter of minutes, using the proper tools. 😀

Bear in mind the fact that my career is correlated with the science papers at the level of a 10th grader. I hold an MA, would love an MS, but I never considered using this to get it.

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Love Is A Phone Call Away

Do you think today is just a ordinary day? Don’t you just love those big fluffy hearts that are everywhere?!? So do we!

As one of our male colleagues put it, Valentine’s Day is a celebration that women worship and man loathe. Except for us! The ladies in 4PSA team are completely unimpressed at being loved more than usual on one particular day. We prefer that to happen every day. 😉

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URL, URN, URI, IRI – Why So Many?

Computer guys tend to lack imagination, especially when they work with acronyms. This may lead to a lot of funny stuff. Let’s look at the following acronyms, for instance: URI, URN, URL, and IRI.

In interviews I like to ask this question and only once a guy was able to give an almost 100% correct answer. Somehow, I was not particularly surprised about it, as even widely adopted specifications contain subtle mistakes.

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Behind the Walls – 4PSA Teams

In a previous article, we promised you a better insight on how we are organized internally, namely the product-oriented teams we built. So, let’s start to review the teams 🙂

Stack

This software engineering team is handling the low-level aspects of our software engineering, i.e. most of the stuff other teams need in order to develop their products. Because we are lazy, we like to keep things standardized. 😀 This means that all frameworks (with one exception) are developed at this level.

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Product Oriented Teams

Until recently, 4PSA has had a pretty standard organization, with function-based departments – Sales and Marketing, Software Development (with many teams), Technical Support, Administration, Human Resources etc. This worked decently for many years and that is why I still recommend it as the default organization for any company really focused on a single product.

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Maya vs. Programmers – 1:0

I watch TV only when I have to, and most times I switch to Discovery or National Geographic. In the past weeks I’ve switched on the TV when they were running some programs about Maya civilization. There are plenty of interesting things to say about Maya, but instead all these programs were focused on the Maya calendar and the end of world.

The problem seems to be that all Maya calendars discovered end in 2012… And guess what, we are close to the end of 2012.

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Cool Summer 2012 Internship Problem Set 7

We’re closing this race with a set of problems that rely heavily on context.

The Cool Summer Internship Race has been a driver of great attitude, since most of what we published left room for creativity, in every sense.  What is more important though is that it turned into a driver of entailing actions.

What are we going to do next:  we want to offer those who would like to become interns at 4PSA the chance to know us in a competition.

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