The speakers of Musala Soft presented the latest in the areas of Smart Home, Open-source, Internet of Things, Java Enterprise and Soft Skills at this year`s edition of ISTA Conference 2017 (The Innovations in Software Technologies and Automation Conference). The professional forum, held for 7th year in a row, took place on November 16th-17th at Sofia Event Center. The registered attendees were almost 800 and the presentations were 30+ running in parallel in three halls.
In his presentation „Overcoming the diversity of smart devices”, Dimitar Ivanov, Team Leader and Alexander Kostadinov, Senior Software Engineer at Musala Soft shared their viewpoint in how we can manage the chaos of Smart home devices available by making a technical analysis of the IoT пазара. They also shared several practical tips from their experience with integration of large number of IoT devices into a Smart home platform.
Hristo Gergov, Test Manager at Musala Soft presented the different kinds of testing and their implementation in IoT with the aim to stress on the unusual challenges that they might bring. In his presentation „Quality of things” he shared his experience as a Test Manager in a large-scale Smart home project and discussed the possible approaches for solving problems in this area.
„A team contributing full-time to open-source projects – a primer on making it happen in your country” was the third and final Musala Soft presentation in the first day of the conference by Iancho Dimitrov, Strategic Clients & Business Development Director and Dimitar Ivanov, Team Leader. „It is not at all common for an IT company to maintain a team focused on the development of an external Open-source product free of charge. And it is even more uncommon in companies which are neither using the product, not delivering services connected to it and do not have any direct benefits from working on it“, said Iancho Dimitrov. In their joint presentation, they shared the expertise of Musala Soft from working on the Open-source Smart Home project openHAB and demonstrated how this endeavor not only can happen but can bring benefits to everyone – to the colleagues, the company, to the open-source society and to the development of innovations in the area. The aim of the session was to motivate other professionals to try and implement the same or similar approach in their companies.
Petyo Dimitov, Software Architect at Musala Soft in the area of Enterprise Java with 10+ years of experience in various projects for international clients, during his presentation „Enterprise Java Developer`s Survival Guide” shared his point of view and expertise in resolving different issues in this area. Among the topis discussed by him . Among the topics he discussed were, for example, how to choose between popular Java frameworks, the pros and cons of the use of ORM, design of REST APIs, implementation considerations, etc. Some of the are specific to Java, while others are more general for the enterprise applications.
In his presentation “Make your home smarter-er”, Stanislav Botev, Project Manager at Musala Soft focused on the practical side of Smart home and made some demonstrations of face recognition and object recognition by means of connected devices.
ISTA 2017 was closed with the presentation „Do architects need soft skills?” by Iancho Dimitrov, Strategic Clients & Business Development Director at Musala Soft. He focused on the wrong, according to him, assumption that the work of software architects is so strictly focused on technical skills that does not require any specific “soft skills”. Iancho shared examples from his experience demonstrating how many different additional areas of operation the software architects have requiring such skills and presented ideas how to gain them in the most effective way.
Five of the attendees at ISTA 2017, chosen among the hundreds who took the challenge to visit the virtual office of Musala Soft and find the hidden code words won microcontrollers from the raffle at the closing of the conference.
Musala Soft was among the organizers of the event along with several other leading companies from the software industry in Bulgaria – Experian, Infragistics, SAP and VMware Bulgaria. Every year, ISTA Conference gathers hundreds of software developers, experts in test automation and engineers, IT managers and leaders, students in the area of information technologies and members of academic societies and is already an established professional platform for sharing of good practices and presentation of latest trends and innovations in software technologies and automation.
