The Importance Of Baseline

Defining a baseline is one of the best things you can do if you want to deliver things fast. It sounds like a pretty simple concept, but the truth is that many software engineers do not understand that there should be a baseline in everything.

baseline

 

I personally try to find and impose baselines in everything I do, as this helps me improve work products. This happens in a pretty simple way – the baseline “forces” me keep track of modifications I make and at the same time it makes me more responsible about them. Let’s review some use cases.

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Senior Security Engineer Wanted

In a previous article we detailed on the team called Team Support. This is basically the team that provides the other 4PSA teams with input and resources so that they can work more efficiently.

Our latest opening in the Team Support (Bucharest, Romania) is quite an interesting one – Senior Security Engineer. What is this position doing in Team Support, you might ask… Two reasons: the person filling this position is going to report directly to upper management and in order to be efficient she/he should not be “corrupted” by a product team.

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Debug Compiled JavaScript Code with Ease

In the Apps Team we develop a wide variety of SPAs. Do not think about any nice hot-springs resort, SPA stands for Single Page Applications. The main reason why SPAs have been gaining a lot of popularity these past few years is because they provide a more appealing user experience. Just take a quick look at Gmail, Official Gmail Blog, The New York Times to name a few. The content is retrieved in a single page load. This means that page sections get dynamically changed.

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Cos’ Every Road Has Its Start

It all started about 10 hours ago and I am still fresh, hopefully due to the amazing coffee. And nothing compares to the feeling of being useful on your first day at work, then receiving your first task as a trainee. I am used to “The Writer” nickname. I always like to write down things, it helps me keep them organized and up to date.

The Trip Companions

I remember I woke up early in the morning to be one of the first to come to the office. First impression as I entered the door: young team, smiles on their faces, a friendly mode of saying “Welcome!”.

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REST Best Practices: Choosing HTTP Methods

We do a lot of REST in the Pineapple team. We love REST. Why? There are many reasons:

  • It is standard, so that creating services always follows a pattern
  • Developing clients is super easy, in all programming languages
  • Programmers can easily understand it
  • Testing (of all types) can be easily automated
  • Because it relies on HTTP, it’s highly scalable infrastructure wise
  • We can choose the preferred data format for sending and receiving information – usually JSON 🙂

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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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