Summer holidays are some of the long-awaited times of the year. During this time, Facebook becomes a wide exhibit of sea and mountain views, filled with smiling people. Now more than ever, beer conversations are no longer threatened by laziness, because there is a rescue question at hand: "Where did you go on holiday?" and "Where would you like to go on holiday?". More and more often, the answers to these questions reflect vacation projects which span over several years, where continents or civilizations are explored. Some projects may seem too radical or ambitious ... but they speak about people's desire to escape, to challenge themselves and to explore contexts other than the ones a job entails. The frequency of such answers should raise some question marks for companies which should realize that, in the long run, the greatest benefits are not money and bonuses, but the free time they give their employees. No matter how much we like spending time on a product, we need free time that is ours and ours alone. It is not surprising that this need becomes greater as people get older. Benefits such as working only 4 days a week or a wider holiday than the one stated by the law are the ones more frequently considered, because they bring along creativity, optimism, problem solving spree and higher productivity. Maybe these will become a rule for companies. Until then, have a nice holiday and see you online, at TSM launch editions and IT DAYS.
The main topic for this issue is automotive. Bosch and Mercedes have recently produced cars which park themselves, and about which you can read more in Good-bye to parking! Enjoy automated valet parking!. Car sharing is a popular solution which is now present in Romania and elsewhere in Europe, a solution where it is not only the car, but also the bank installments that are shared. An innovative solution of car lease sharing B2B & B2C presents the back scene of such a solution: the technologies and the underlying architecture. Within the same automotive area, you can read about the challenges of this industry's testers: The psychological profile of automotive testers. OpenStreetMap is a map Wikipedia, as the author of OpenStreetMap in the age of Spark clearly states. Read it to learn how Spark deals with an enormous amount of XML data. What are the traps that are hard to avoid when using Ansi C on a multicore processor? You can read about some of these in The software read-modify-write routing in multicore systems. We end with an invitation to learn from other developers what development is all about at Code Week Romania.
by Simona Pop
by Dan Sabadis
