Tuesday, December 24, 2019

Once upon a December



        It's absolutely unbelievable how one single experience can completely change your vision in life. You realize how out of your hands life has been so far. And you dive, you dive in so deeply, that you can almost reach for the bottom. Then you see your reflexion and ask yourself why did you allow it to reach that course and did nothing? Turn the wheel around and head in the other direction. Memories keep flashing before your eyes, but you can't grab them, not a single one of them. Then you close your fists and your eyes so tightly, that you can almost feel the blood being pumped through your veins, thinking that maybe you could go back into the past and make it all differently,  make it matter. But there is nothing there and your fear grows so big, that it becomes palpable and you're about to let it consume you. 

         The anger starts crawling in, angry with yourself for having turned into someone you don't even recognize, you don't even want and you're ashamed of. And you realize they never left, they were still there, patiently waiting for you to remember them, to cherish their presence, their company,  their affection. Time elapses, but memories stay. Good deeds never vanish. A kiss on the forehead, a tight hug, loving eyes and a genuine smile. Touches roaming through your soul and whispers leaving unseen scars on your body. Earthly visions embrace your existence. 

   And you see the sparkle, the dew of happiness haunting you, making you love yourself and taking possession of all the beauty that lies inside yourself. The explosion could almost take your sight, you will not let anyone decide for you anymore. You will forever bounce on the rope of decisions and decide when to cut it or keep going. And you feel the relief, the power growing inside of you, the pride of your own road taken and the disappointment of the roads previously not taken. No more. No freaking more.
        You smile at yourself in the mirror because now you have it again, girl. The courage to shape your own future, to dare, to leave the comfort zone, to do extraordinary things because they are fit an extraordinary person, to strive for success and freaking attain it, to let society target other victims, to feel that you have the world at your feet because you walk boldly, confidently and genuinely happy through life. Your happiness does not depend on anyone but yourself. Make this life matter and don't let anyone interfere. 



        You think you can guess what others feel or want based on how people of a certain age, race, cultural space, sex etc. normally act. Most of the times, people get it all wrong, because they make assumptions of a you-projection. You mirror yourself in others and apply the filter of your own conscience. Instead, you should withdraw your attention from yourself when judging others and stop making rough guesses, see if what you imagined really matches reality. On the other way, the only influence you can have is on yourself. Once you keep struggling to understand or to change another person's behaviour or thoughts but your own, you will only put a brick to the wall of your own unhappiness.
    Your life is about pleasing yourself, about reaching your own goals, about treasuring the simple things in life, not about pleasing others.

     What is the kind of life that you want to lead? Do you want to lead it or be lead by it?  

Thursday, December 12, 2019

Tech Hub

   



    On the 16th of November, for approximately 10 hours, Craiova hosted the GDG Devfest 2019. Why did the organizers choose precisely this town? Because it is listed among Romania's first 7 IT Hubs and there are more than 40 companies active in the IT area that have chosen Craiova as the place to develop their activity. Among the organizers, we have found a warm and determined woman, Carmen Ciulacu, who was the first woman to start a developers' community in Europe 7 years ago.  




                           Photo credit: Adrian Sora

        The first speaker, Xiaoli (Shery) Cheng, who is a senior software engineer at Google China, started the technical journey by putting together the pieces that make Google Nest, the new concept of a smart house. With the help of a Nest WiFi point, you will now be able to adjust the brightness of a room, to musically travel in time and all around the globe by using the music player, to ensure the safety of your home whether you are there or not, basically to make your life easier with this concept that resembles the functionalities of the Google Assistant. The presentation followed its due course by introducing to us its main purpose, a means to use an end-to-end open source platform, in order to develop machine learning tasks: Tensor Flow.  It can run on multiple CPUs, on servers  (Extended), on phones  (Android, iOS), on Edge Devices  (Lite), Javascript (JS), it can imply word recognition tasks and be used within the health system (e.g. : scanning the eyes for blood spots or hemorrhages in diabethes), or in order to recognize flowers on Android by training a neuro-network to classify the images.



                 Photo credit: Adrian Sora


             Alina Cătălina Bănuleasa came with a more human centered presentation and with suggestions that could improve both the interaction between technology and human beings, and the way designers and developers understand and make use of human psychology in order to come up with better versions of their products. Technology alienates people, pledges Alina, because it interferes with this social need to create social groups that goes back to our primal experience as tribes. People are prone to mistakes and limitations and are sometimes impaired: hearing impaired, visually impaired, color blind, with a limited dexterity, physically and mentally challenged. In spite of all this, if we assume that there is an average human and therefore create for him,  we are going to have an average product. What Artificial Intelligence does is to simulate human intelligence and thought and to learn continuously through experience because it is taught, not programmed. There are currently 3.8 billion assistants in use (February 2019), and it is estimated that by 2023 this number will increase up to 8 billion assistants worldwide. 



          Cătălin Meșter showed us how Design Sprints work, a model which has been implemented by a large range of well-known companies around the world such as Google, Netflix, Uber etc. and it is a proper method for a bug/ problem solving within a short period of time. The company Cătălin works for, Stefanini, came up with an original concept called Stefanini Dive, which is fit for a fast design sprint, in order to bring innovation to an enterprise within 5 days. When you want to put up a team, the first thing one should bear in mind is the selection of a decider and of a facilitator, who can timebox all the conversations. Design Sprints is a five-phase project  (understand, sketch, decide, prototype, validate), which could invest desirability, viability and feasibility into your purpose. The possible outcomes could be either an efficient failure, a flawed success or an epic win.  



                  Photo credit: Adrian Sora

      George Bonea, a very popular influencer and demotivational speaker, as he describes himself, caught the audience's attention by criticizing the superficial society nowadays and the values that threaten to take control of the next generations and not only.



                  Photo credit: Adrian Sora

   Alexandra Petruş focused her presentation on attention oriented applications which are to make our future easier and safer: car systems that could stop the car or warn you if they sense that your attention has shifted to another place while driving, platforms such as Netflix pausing the movie if, again, our attention is not dedicated entirely to the main activity of watching the movie and so on.




     Cristian Lefter came with a presentation regarding the Intelligent Query Processing in SQL Server 2019 by highlighting the differences between SQL Server 2017 and SQL Server 2019. We spoke about the "merge" function, where both tables are sorted, about the "hash-join", which implies creating a hash table and checking if there is a match between a value from this table and a value from the second table, about the adaptive QP and the interleaved execution. While the batch mode means modifying multiple rows simultaneously in the processor,  the row mode takes each row, one by one,  and applies the change in the processor. Because a function is executed on each row, we need a cardinality estimation, which points to the number of rows that will result out of an operator. 



                Photo credit: Adrian Sora

       Matthieu Auger from France introduced us to a Javascript library that helps increase the performance of the websites, GatsbyJS, by coming up with a better load behaviour among other stuff. Why does performance play an important role and how can GatsbyJS and GraphQL improve the web developer's experience when it comes to the creation of modern apps were topics that concerned both the speaker, and the audience. Matthieu worked on the example of the Paris.js community, in order to illustrate concepts such as npm packages, the traced SVG, the link hover and to point out the differences between GraphQL sud GraphiQL




        Last but not least, Maciej Treder made us familiar with another perspective in what Angular CLI is concerned. By using collection.json, we were able to observe what comments were available in the library, whereas Schematics had a major call when it comes to improving a project by making changes based on the provided library. When it comes to the Tree and Rule objects, it is important to bear in mind that Tree is the one to help you navigate within the directory.