Recently, our Infrastructure team received a task that involved restricting access to a service only from certain countries. To make things even harder, this had to be done on Cisco IOS devices with relatively low performance. We will review in this article how we were able to solve this.
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.
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. 😉
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.
The most important thing parents should teach kids are the mechanisms for self-improvement. This is basically what differentiates people from computers. When computers will be endowed with such a power, they will become more powerful than humans. And most likely humanity will disappear 🙂
We thought that you might be interested in a couple of software engineering positions opened in Bucharest, Romania. We will start sharing them on the blog.
In a previous article, we mentioned 4PSA’s Pineapple crazy team. Pineapple is the code name for a new product; the kind of stuff everyone needs, but not many know how it’s going to look like.
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.
Most programmers think they know what this means. I’ve heard it many times because I often ask developers on job interviews to tell me what they prefer.
Why?
Might sound like a trivial question, but it is quite relevant. Programming languages are just tools and we want to know whether our possible future colleague is able to understand how things work.
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.
When I first ask someone this question, I usually get a brutal answer: not a chance!!! This is what I’ve learned the hard way: true innovation is a process. Accidental innovation is not a process, but a fortunate mistake. 😉 In order to innovate, you have to follow a recipe because innovation must be consistent.
