We want everyone to be really involved into projects they are assigned to. And these are going to be software development projects - some trainees will be working on our internal projects and some other will cooperate within already existing real teams. Either way – it is going to be a productive time for everyone.

We strongly believe into talents and creative ideas of young people. It is extremely important to give students a good opportunity to understand the way software is commercially produced. It lets to join theoretical deep knowledge with practical experience resulting in the best possible preparation for future career.

Good luck everyone!

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Long, long time ago I used to work with CsGL – that was one of the first OpenGL wrappers for .NET environment. Bad news are that its development has been stopped quite soon. Even worse was the fact, that basically it completely didn’t work with .NET 2.0… However it is still number one in many Google keywords like “opengl c#“.

That work was being continued by some contributors (Randy Ridge). Tao framework was another one very good library created both for .NET and Mono. Similarly the development has stopped and the last known release is dated to November 2005.

Recently I have found a very promising project called The Open Toolkit library (OpenTK). Which is a C# library wrapping most of the OpenGL, OpenCL and OpenAL functions. The RC1 version has been released on March 2010, so I believe that it will still be developed actively now. One of its great features (which simply does not exist in other wrappers of this kind) is the support for .NET types and classes for all OpenGL settings (yes – finally you can use Color class instead of RGB components only). It runs on different platforms and supports all .NET languages.

Definitely worth checking!

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Task board in Jira with Greenhopper

That rocks – you can simply drag and drop cards with tasks and mark them appropriately. One of the drawbacks is the level of Jira complexity. A lot of people are afraid of the system at the first sight. However once you get used to use it on the daily basis, you simply cannot live without it. Perfect for agile teams.

Recently I’ve had a chance to try simpler approach and closely related to Scrum methodology. There is new application available called ScrumNinja (http://scrumninja.com/). ScrumNinja beats Jira in simplicity and readable user interface. Similarly you can drag all cards and update them when necessary easily. The status of the project is also clearly presented to all involved parties. The only drawback, which I found is the pricing – having 60 users on-board in our company, we would have to pay almost twice as for Jira system. However the hosted offer is quite reasonable and worth considering. Especially if you are working on open source project – they are hosted for free. That might be an interesting solution.

One of our team is working on couple of projects in parallel for the same customer. For some projects we are using Jira, but we also need to use external separated tracking applications. That makes the life harder and having the summary of on-going tasks can be really difficult. We worked out that real task board might be an effective solution. Take a look at our proof of concept below :)

Real world task board - our proof of concept

Yes – quite colourful :) This is one of the features. Differently from other Scrum teams, colors indicate projects – each project has a separate color. Each team member has its own subsection within “In Progress” area. We are updating the task board on the daily basis during our morning stand-ups. Once a week we are removing all Done tasks and add tasks, which are planned for another week. It is not a secret, that we got inspired by Roy’s ideas. And it works especially good for environment, where sprints cannot be synchronized among different projects.

Our idea was to start using it quick and easy. One might say, that it is not perfect and there are so many things to improve in the process. I say – OK, let’s do it. If somebody from our team sees, that it might be improved, than it is great. The idea is to start implementing useful tools quickly and improve (refactor) the approach learning from experience. So we liked our proof of concept and now we have it even bigger (since the team is getting bigger as well :) )

Task board refactored

It’s the end of the week today, so some of us need to finish a lot before the weekend ;)

It is big, visible and effective. One more thing – it is fun to be able to do something in real world. When sitting 8 hours in the Matrix, it is good to stand up and be able to move your card from In Progress to Done. It motivates a lot :)

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If you need local fully customizable charting, you should look at the following chart packages:

• Open Flash Chart. This is actually the second version of this powerful and free library. It is small, quick and provides completely free charting.
  
• XML/SWF Charts. In many cases it is worth to pay $50 single licence to have the possibilities of this kind. Highly customizable graphics is worth seeing.
• Highcharts. It is free charting solution for non-commercial applications. Commercial users need to pay $80 per single site, but still worth consideration.
• FushionCharts. One of the best complete solution on the market. There is a free version as well, but the actual force of the package is provided in the full commercial version. Highly valuable – we have used it for some of our projects and customers are really pleased.

The most important fact is that in any of the above packages you are receiving the out of the box solution, which you can start using in minutes. In most cases it is just a case of proper XML data input preparation. You can also often get an interesting sample code, which should be enough to place the chart on you page.

Have a good charting!

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This year we will have an opportunity to work in international team inside our office. Four Spanish developers – students will come to our company to spend here 3 months working with us. We are looking forward to training our Spanish :)

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It is an interesting thing, that the content and conclusions of our paper are still up to date. Basing on worldwide researches and our practical experience, we have prepared the analysis of different activities related to offshore outsourcing. Many factors have changed, the crisis is enfolding, but certainly the outsourcing is becoming one of the most important areas of today’s global market.

The crisis clearly uncovered all weaknesses of global economy. However it for sure will have a positive feedback in long term perspective – it leads to regularizing all markets, which were loosely bound to reality. Bubbles which are too big and empty inside must collapse sooner or later. It touches all players on the market, however big ones (especially those artificially big) feel that the most. We believe, that the outsourcing is an important answer for today’s global economy, business structure and the crisis itself. It relates to all different areas, but it is very clearly visible within IT area.

IT services outsourcing started to become extremely popular along with the development of new communication possibilities and infrastructure. In fact we discovered, that efficient communication is the key factor for the successful offshore cooperation. For sure it requires proper infrastructure (like Office Communication Server and Unified Communication, which we have implemented in PGS couple of months ago). Although we can also see, that even more important is to define proper communication process and to build the awareness of responsibility in the whole team. Since we have that implemented, the physical distance between customer and the supplier is not longer the limit.

Many players have already discovered the fact, that for the long perspective, it is much better to outsource IT services to the company, which specializes in the given area. For many years outsourcing was meant to be the answer for lowering the costs. Currently this approach is also changing rapidly. We can see that very clearly, that many companies are looking for reliability and the highest quality of services. These are the values, which we aim at providing to our customers all the time. We believe, that these are the main factors of the success for both sides and this is the only possibility to effectively implement the win-win strategy.

If you are interested in the above mentioned topic, leave us a comment and we can keep on discussing it. The above mentioned paper is available in the book placed on our library shelf in Wroclaw office.

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The reference definition, which we used, was the one, which is meant to be the official statement saying “technology can be called innovative if it has not been in use for more than xxx years…”. Useful as this definition is for official purposes, it does not really give you the practical meaning of the innovation.

If you think about innovative products, which are so common currently… The statement, that Google or Skype are innovative applications, is obvious. The core question (not only in this case) is “Why is that?”. Is Skype innovative, because it uses some rocket science technology or newly created algorithms for voice transmission? Recently Skype is improving its transmission quality, servers availability and similar points within user experience area. However when Skype was launched, it was using commonly known voice compression and transmission methods. It was just the “Internet telephony, which just works”. Some of the students are using more sophisticated algorithms in their master thesis, than those, which were used for the first version of Skype.

The key thing is that “it just works”. Skype developers know, how to put all things together to create something working. And the result was that everybody started to use it. After couple of years millions of people are using Skype as their primary communication channel. Because using it is cheaper, easier, more comfortable… Because you can call your buddy in Australia as easily as contact your wife or parents living in the same city. Life of millions of people changed. Similarly with Google, cell phones, e-mails, PDAs and so on…
What is the main reason, why Skype or Google are meant to be innovative then? It is not because they are developing rocket science technology (however I am sure, that currently those companies invest millions of dollars into their R&D departments). The main reason is that life of people changed in many ways, because they started to use those products. A lot of habits changed, many areas of life improved. This is far more practical definition of innovation.

At the PGS Software we are using the latest technology, which combined with our experience leads to amazing applications. However, the main reason, why we call PGS an innovative company is, that we bring innovative solutions to the business of our customers. We are not only preparing a piece of software basing on already received specification. In many cases we implement a completely new process into the company of our customer – starting from the analysis of its needs and finishing on the implementation of process innovation. As a result the business of our customer changes – it becomes more competitive with improved quality and performance. Similarly as the life of many people changed, when they started to use Skype or Google.

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