TomTom Engineering Podcast - The Magic Behind The Map

User experience is at the core of the product we create at TomTom. In this episode we talk about UX research (and also how it differs from UX design) in TomTom with Elise Wabeke. Elise holds a master’s degree Design for Interaction from the Delft University of Technology.

Links

•  Sketching User Experiences by Bill Buxton
• Ammassalik wooden maps

In this episode we talk about 3D rendering with Rok Erjavec. Rok is technical director for map visualization in TomTom, with long term experience in 3D rendering (specifically for the game-industry, consoles and embedded systems).

We talk about the history and progress of 3D rendering in resource-constraint environments and how great map visualization can make a difference in navigation.

In this episode we talk with Ivan Diaz who is a Principal Staff Engineer at TomTom who is working on the systems which automate part of our map making and distribution systems. 

Ivan, has over 20 years of experience in software engineering. He feels at home designing complex distributed systems for greenfield and/or integrated projects, with a mixture of cloud technologies and messaging systems.
 

Today we will dive into world of rendering a map and talk with Oliver Wipfli. 

He is one of the coordinators and a governing board member of the Maplibre open-source project. Oliver holds a master’s degree in physics and worked as a PhD student in quantum engineering and optics. He also worked as an intern at Nvidia working on PhysX/Omniverse products. 

Maplibre website: https://maplibre.org
Maplibre sponsorship program: https://maplibre.org/sponsors/
Maplibre on GitHub:https://github.com/maplibre

 This episode we go on a journey through machine learning and data science with Ankit Jain. 

Ankit Jain is Engineering Manager Machine Learning at Meta. Ankit is an experienced AI Researcher/Machine Learning Engineer who has researched and deployed several scalable machine learning models at Uber, Meta and Bank of America. He Co-authored a bestseller book "Tensorflow Machine Learning Projects" and has published in top AI conferences like Neurips, ICML and ICLR. He has undergraduate and graduate degrees from Indian Institute of Technology Bombay (India) and UC Berkeley. 

 In this episode we hang out with Gary Hogarth who is a staff engineer in the TomTom Amigo development team.  Amigo is our latest free mobile navigation app that is build using React-native.

 We talk about his journey into becoming a software engineer, react-native, turbo modules instead of bridges and breaking things.

Resources mentioned in the podcast:

• React Native
• Turbo Modules
• Flutter
• Download TomTom Amigo Mobile App

Interested in a career at TomTom? Check out Careers @TomTom

In this episode we have a chat with  Rick Rackow who is an Expert Site Reliability Engineer at TomTom.

We start by learning how Rick originally started his career as a car mechanic and how he got interested in software engineering and site reliability engineering . During the interview we discuss Site Reliability Engineering (SRE), DevOps, Kubernetes and OpenShift. We also discuss the benefits of treating infrastructure as code and what advantages and caveats immutable infrastructures have. Finally, we ask Rick about his upcoming book titled "Operating OpenShift, an SRE approach to managing infrastructure", to be published by O'Reilly.

Resources mentioned in the podcast:

• Kubernetes: The Documentary PART 1
• Kubernetes: The Documentary PART 2
• O'Reilly Early Access Chapters Operating OpenShift - An SRE Approach to managing infrastructure

Interested in a career at TomTom? Check out Careers @TomTom