Near-constant distractions have become the norm in workplaces around the world. Workers are struggling to get more done and focus harder with little understanding of what attention is or how to attain or manage it productively. Steelcase research revealed seven myths (and their truths) about how to manage your attention at work.

A new year is always regarded as an opportunity to do things better and to evolve. 2016 could also be an ideal year for the growth of our company, if we manage to properly tackle the challenges in store. Before we start talking about next year’s specifics though, let’s review the general context our world is currently facing:

The way we live and carry on our daily activities is characterized by speed and concourse. We have to deal with an overwhelming amount of tasks and activities. Moreover, we are assaulted by an excess of information: email messages, news on different channels (printed newspapers, online media, radio or TV), phone calls, Skype messages or on other instant-messaging solutions, Facebook, Linkedin, received documents, colleagues and collaborators, clients, different types of reunions. What should our attitude and reaction be to this situation? 

Logging and audit is a must have to for all applications. Without this information, monitoring and support team would not be able to know what is happening in the system, if the system works correctly and what happens in a specific point in time. On top of this, from a security perspective, you need to audit at different levels of your system who is accessing your system, what is the action and when.

At the end of the each month, in our EU offices we organize an OSMTime meetup. Similar to the Maptime format, during the OSMtime meetup, local maps enthusiasts gather to share information regarding OpenStreetMap initiatives and tools and partake in map editing activities. While all GIS related information & tools are within scope, the main focus of these meetups is OpenStreetMap editing, and more specifically improving OSM within the immediate geographic vicinity.

The strategies of software development have always been and will continue to be a permanent topic of debate and contradictions, which generates at the same time an environment favorable to important ideas. Throughout the years, I have had the opportunity of dealing with different opinions and attitudes regarding this topic. 

We have all seen the cool movies like 'Enemy of the state' in which the NSA is able to pin-point your location, without you noticing, by using your phone. The movie was released in 1998, and at the time those ideas might have looked like science fiction, but nowadays this might actually be plausible. With our upcoming fedex day, this was a good opportunity to try it out. Surely we don't have the capabilities or the time that the intelligence agency has, but we should give it a shot.

A common question is how many objects or how many Strings does a section of code create. Often the answer is not what you think nor should you really need to know. It is useful to have an idea of when an object is created but there is so many other factors which are often far more important to consider which can mean the total number for an application is not what you think. String is a not a single object

”What can you build using only LEGO bricks?” was a challenge we launched a few weeks ago. We were courious what can be built using LEGOs, and your imagination and involvement really took us by surprise. We’d really like to thank you for that! This also confirms the fact that adults really do enjoy playing, and that they can be quite creative. This is illustrated in an album on our Facebook page which contains all of your creations. Here you will also be able to find those creations which have been declared the winners of this challenge (Facebook/azimut.teambuilding).

In a few words, **ironwingjs** is a lightweight, framework-agnostic JavaScript library. **ironginwjs** is ment to be super easy to use and easy to integrate on any app. Out of the box it offers CRUD manipulation over a REST API interface. It all started as a simple necessity on a private project. We needed an easy way to asimilate a RESTful API and manage the data on the client. We didn't want to use a framework at the time. We just wanted a simple library without extra dependencies to achieve this. So we started writting a small implementation of our own. It turned out to be exactly what we needed for the task at hand. So... why not open source it?