4 years ago I was getting ready for a presentation about Cake PHP, one which I had to deliver to colleagues. I had prepared an entire documentation when I got into Laravel. It immediately gained my attention, so I began making my research intensely. After I got through a dense documentation set, I discovered that Google trends was already talking about Laravel. According to the trends, Laravel was the last, with Yii, Zend Framework, Codeigniter and Cake PHP, above it. The image below could be seen in my presentation 4 years ago.

The main focus in the IT recruitment process goes towards finding the people with the best technological (and abstract reasoning) skills. Rightfully so, these technical capabilities are THE necessary prerequisite for any good employment in our industry. At the same time, the big employers are also oriented, in their hiring strategy, towards searching and matching the best "characters" to a particular advertised position. This is understandable as the big companies are more stable than the start-ups, so the large organizations will invariably put more emphasis on long-time stability than on short-term outstanding results. That's why the corporate hiring staff usually has two main approaches.

24th of December 1914, the Western front during World War I - the German and the British troops vanquish one another in a bloody fight, suffering heavy losses on both sides. Suddenly, the German soldiers, who are hidden in trenches, hear Christian carols from the other side of the field and notice little lights that they soon recognize as candles for Christmas prayers. To the shock and awe of the British side, some of the bolder German soldiers cross the battle field and join in the singing and prayers. The German wish the British a Merry Christmas in English. They were unarmed and did not have any military intentions. The same troops that had hunted down one another, killing and hurting whomever, now shake hands and celebrate the birth of Jesus together, on the battle field.

Making vehicles available to people who do not have access to this service is an idea which has been gaining momentum in Europe, ever since 1987. It was then that people started reevaluating the actual costs of owning a vehicle, compared to the actual time the vehicle is used, an approximate 8 days per year.  The car sharing market is available in more than 1000 cities, the following cities being representatives for Europe: Berlin, Munich and Vienna. We believe technology and innovation can improve the quality of life, and this vision permeates the projects we developed. Distributed mobility services do not bring benefits cost-wise, but they diminish the negative impact of personal cars on the environment. 

We are continuously innovating and changing the auto field. If, until 10 years ago, a full test cycle for a software product for the auto industry took 2 years, the test period is now considerably reduced in view of an ever-growing market and of fierce competition. We have more and more electronic equipment in our car, the auto autonomy is greater and greater, and the development and testing time is more and more reduced. Given all these aspects, how do we choose our staff, how do we select testers? How do we ensure that we deliver high-quality products?

There are multiple automotive embedded systems one of which is the car navigation system. OpenStreetMap (OSM)-based GPS navigation apps are increasingly used as OSM is the only crowd-sourced and open-sourced global map. OSM is constantly improved by the worldwide OSM users, and by the map-analysts at Telenav. Therefore, the OSM permanently catches up with the changes from reality. Even though there are several map features that can be used when mapping, there are some tags specific to routing. By way of illustration, turn-restrictions, oneway roads, road name, signposts or road geometry are examples of map features that can influence routing.

James Bond doesn’t waste any time looking for parking spaces. In all the films, you see him getting out right in front of the hotel entrance or airport before throwing the car keys to a valet and continuing on his mission. Parking is just something other people do. Most drivers have had to do without a valet – but now that’s about to change.

In the previous article we laid out the foundation of what multithreading is and described the pillar of asynchronous programming in .Net, namely the IAsyncResult interface. We also provided a brief history of the evolution of the .Net multithreading abstractization, starting with the Thread class and ending with the async-await pattern (and keywords). In this article we will elaborate on the topic, giving detailed .Net thread synchronization examples, focusing on the two modes the CPU is spending time, in any modern operating system: the user-mode and the kernel-mode. As usual, we start with the definitions.

This month, we will focus on some international startups which, we believe, can be a great source of inspiration for all of us. Despite the fact that the Romanian startup scene is more and more animated, we would like to see a greater concern for reasearch and hardware, aspects which are more neglected than services. We notice that the investment area is also coming back to life and is gaining momentum in startups. The first step is always the most difficult, and in order for you to promote your startup, TSM helps you get your projects published. We are an email away.

OpenStreetMap is an open/collaborative map considered the Wikipedia of maps. There are tons of information available online and even books about it... Anyway, it is not the history of OSM that we will discuss here. We will rather take a look at the impressive dataset behind and how such a big map can be analysed with modern technologies as Apache Spark.