Looking for a passion for Ruby, cloud and big data

Back in 2010…

…Antonio was announcing that IBM was looking for top notch student hackers.

After a process that provided many skill-building lessons, Henrique and myself joined the team at the IBM Toronto Software Lab.

Today…

…it's time again to look for the right attitude and for a matching potential.
We are looking for 2 students that are passionate about technology and their craft!

I am biased but I believe that these are the best positions that a computer science student can want. Since I flew in straight from Romania, I grew in an Agile environment with Ruby and Rails—from zero to deployment—with cloud computing, big data and related technologies.
Our team is best described as a "Startup within IBM". You get the best of both worlds: a highly challenging environment where you get to try to do absolutely everything and a stable environment where you can focus on developing great ideas without being distracted by the instability of a startup.

If…

• you are keen on using bleeding edge technologies
• you have a hacker mentality
• you are willing to work in a start-up like setting but enjoy stability and resources of a leading technology company

then you will gain experience that is unmatched. You will work hand in hand with some of the best talent in the industry architecting and building the coolest tech. Oh, and this internship is for a period of 16 months, and yes: it's a paid internship.

If you are looking for a rewarding challenge, and if your eyebrow raised in a positive way while reading till here, please get in touch (marius dot butuc at ca dot ibm dot com gmail dot com) and tell me a bit about yourself. I will provide you with the information on how to apply through the official IBM channels and we'll take it from there.

IBM Mobile Database for Android

Today IBM Mobile Database – the new database offering for Android mobile devices – went GA. IBM Mobile Database offers a tight integration between a customer’s mobile solution and their existing DB2 or Informix environment. It is being offered as a free-of-charge web download.

The new offering makes it easier for mobile developers to develop and assemble applications for Android devices. Together with the solidDB offering, IBM Mobile Database provides the capability to synchronize data with DB2 and Informix databases.

Mobile, but fit for the Enterprise

The major highlights include:

• 6 MB footprint, in-memory database to fit on mobile devices
• Full-featured relational DB with standard SQL API, procedures, triggers
• Fast and reliable access to enterprise data offline
• Enterprise level data security
• Persistent data storage and Automatic recovery
• Transactional storage also during connection loss
• Built-in replication capabilities allowing synchronization with IBM databases
• Flexible options such as partitioning data or creating views to customize data for each device or user

What Android mobile app would you build to put these features to good use?

Moodle localization: to enrol or to enroll?

Ever wondered how would language localization affect a Moodle powered online educational site with more than 38,000 active users?

Moodle Trivia

We all know Moodle—the FLOSS CMS/LMS (a.k.a. e-learning software platform)—was first baked all the way in Australia. And you could see that Moodle was Australian at heart long before it grew to be the large international community that it is today.

One of these Australian fingerprints is the language it chooses to speak… err… spell.
The language pack installed and used by default by Moodle is English (en) and it prefers the British English spelling over the American English one.

Going international

No big deal, you might say. Well, the numbers can decide, so let's take a specific example: BigDataUniversity.com.

Big Data University—the online educational site about big data—has more than 38,000 users (at the time of writing). Registering, they follow free big data-related courses on subjects from Hadoop Fundamentals to Streams Computing or to Text Analytics.
Quite the vibrant, diverse community, and it's all powered by Moodle.

One detail worth noting: more than 1 out of 4 users are from US. Now imagine the number of users that were eager to enroll in a course, only to find enrolment options… and how many emails reporting the enrol vs. enroll "misspelling" we got so far.

And this is not an isolated case. The Moodle forums are proof of how many users asked for an elegant way to change this spelling. This question is so popular, it even made it to the Moodle FAQ.

The elegant way to change enrol to enroll

The elegant solution is to change the default language pack used by Moodle:

1. Install the English - United States (en_us) language pack in
   Settings » Site administration » Language » Language packs.
2. Set the new language pack as the default language for the site via
   Settings » Site administration » Language » Language settings.
   
   
   
   Note that this change will only affect the new accounts, while existing users will retain their language setting. If they want to use American English, they can change it in
   Settings » My profile settings » Edit profile » Preferred language
3. …and it works!
   

Sometimes it's the small details that will make your users happy.