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New services, new site

Everyone knows that Spiria can code, and code well. But did you know that we can also help you up define your customer acquisition strategy or provide you with support and maintenance services following your product launch? Providing a platform that…
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October 03, 2020
MVPs: Your most valuable plan to hit the market swiftly!

When creators think up a new product, they often include a thousand and one features to make it engaging and totally unique. Unfortunately, the resulting beast is often huge and unwieldy.
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October 22, 2020
Spiria’s Recipe for a Tasty IT Resume

Psychologists believe that, on average, it takes about 7 seconds to form a first impression. That’s not much, considering how crucial first impressions are in creating strong relationships. Have you given any thought to the role of your resume in…
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July 02, 2020
How to get started in e-commerce

For neighbourhood stores, going on-line can seem like a huge challenge. Jean-Sebastien Dionne, Production Manager at Spiria Montreal, has lots of experience with e-business. Here, he gives you some wise advice to get you on your way.
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June 11, 2020
Launch of Sentinel service for the construction industry

Maestro and Spiria, in collaboration with Oriso, launch Sentinel – a free online questionnaire to help monitor COVID-19 symptoms among construction workers.
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May 07, 2020
Five important things I’ve learned as a junior developer

Junior developers have to learn so many things on the job, because they’re not taught in school. Samuel, from Spiria Montreal, shares his top five lessons:
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May 07, 2020
How to get the most out of your first patent application

Filing a patent application is an expensive proposition that can be a major investment for a new company. A common mistake of rookie applicants is to give their patent too narrow a scope, seriously constricting their ability to fully take advantage…
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February 27, 2020
Helping a team manage severe constraints

In the world of Agile development, changes are always to be expected, and teams are generally used to handling them. Sometimes, though, a change comes with such a severe constraint that it looks almost impossible to solve, which puts significant…
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January 09, 2020
User Story Mapping: what it is, how it works

During a recent Agile Tour, I attended a workshop (led by Alain Benoît and Jean-Christophe Lauffer) on how to use the technique of User Story Mapping to visualize the right product for the client. It was a great activity. Here’s an overview of how…
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October 31, 2019
Bringing an idea to life through the Discovery process

The Discovery process is an intense collaboration tailored to find relevant and innovative answers to the digital challenges faced by enterprises.
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October 24, 2019
Change, bonds, and board games

For Ivan, playing board games with his colleagues has many more virtues than just fun:
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October 09, 2019
SMEs: time to go digital

Large corporations have long since gone digital, doing away with paper and automating their processes as much as possible. But SMEs can also reap the benefits of technology to optimize their processes, increase profits and grow.
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September 26, 2019
Spiria’s growth once again at the forefront

Spiria makes the list of Canada’s 500 fastest-growing companies for the eighth straight year, thanks to employee commitment and client trust.
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September 12, 2019
Accessibility as part of success

For most of us, the word accessibility means to have access to something. Wikipedia defines it more specifically as “…the design of products, devices … or environments so as to be usable by people with disabilities”.
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September 05, 2019
Taking Fun Seriously

Don Ramsey, Director of Post-Production at Spiria, is a big believer in team activities outside the office. He takes fun very seriously and is always organizing fun activities with his team. Here, he shares his experience with us.
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August 22, 2019
Processes topped with a sprinkle of standards

Documentation, consistency, reusability, code reviews, unit tests, scalability… processes and standards that make the difference. Kevin from Spiria Toronto tells you more.
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August 01, 2019
Constraint drives innovation

Innovation is not just about creating products that change the world; it is present in all inventions that go beyond the ordinary, no matter how modestly. However, it doesn’t spring out of nowhere. Specific conditions and a certain state of mind are…
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July 25, 2019
Software development: 8 benefits of outsourcing

Outsourcing software development projects can address some challenges. Discover the 8 benefits of outsourcing in one infographic.
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July 11, 2019
Good Product Management Builds Lasting Businesses

What is the purpose of a product strategy and why is it important? Gita tells us more:
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June 27, 2019
Busting the Myths, the Tester’s Way

Software Testing, a pillar of the life cycle of software development, not only saves businesses from disaster, but also helps to grow them. Imagine the fate of a company that releases a poor-quality product – it gambles its very reputation when it…
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June 13, 2019
Three Lessons I Learned as a Junior Developer

Junior developers have to learn so many things on the job, because they’re not taught in school. Wajid, from Spiria Toronto, shares his top three lessons.
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June 06, 2019
Working as a developer in a technology services company

Working as a developer in the technology services industry provides huge, if underrated, opportunities for career growth and satisfaction. There is a certain attraction to working as a developer within a software product-based company; it stems from…
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May 09, 2019
PO and development team, the importance of good collaboration

Stéphane Rouleau, President and CEO of Spiria, reflects on the collaboration that is necessary between Product Owners (whether internal or external) and the development team to ensure the success of software projects.
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May 02, 2019
The top three problems that plague development projects

Melissa, who has a wealth of experience in project management, suggests practical solutions to the top three problems most often encountered in application and Web site development projects:
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April 03, 2019
Working at Spiria

What is it like to work at Spiria? That question is best answered by Spirians themselves. Five of them talk about what makes Spiria special.
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March 28, 2019
Inclusive design: because humanity is diverse

Inclusive design means designing your product taking into account the great diversity of people that will interact with it, so that no-one loses out, and everyone wins. Kevin Dekker, UX/UI designer at Spiria Toronto, explains.
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March 14, 2019
Eight things to bear in mind about software development

Are off-the-shelf software solutions no longer meeting your needs? Are you thinking of bespoke software development to support your company’s growth? Here are eight helpful tips that’ll be especially useful if you’re on your first development…
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January 24, 2019
Identify the right software development partner

The first step in choosing the ideal software development partner–and perhaps the most important one–is finding the right company to turn your idea into a software. Your choice of companies will influence your project’s chances of…
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January 17, 2019
100 petabytes on the asphalt superhighway: the Snowmobile solution

In the era of Big Data and megadata, consider Snowmobile, a most seasonable solution next time you need to transfer a couple of exabytes to the cloud.
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December 06, 2018
Agile: less recipes, more state of mind

Too many people think of Agile as nothing more than Scrum and a bunch of rituals. But perform a rite and lose sight of its purpose, and you’ll end up far from Agile. 
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November 22, 2018
Artificial Intelligence: a science in need of a conscience

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that artificial intelligence will be the great revolution of our century. AI stands at the crossroads of technology, ethics, morality, and the human factor. And that’s what makes it so fascinating.
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November 15, 2018
Smart Cities and LoRaWAN: the Calgary story

All Smart City strategies have one thing in common: a nervous system of connected objects that gather and transmit data. These objects may do any number of things – monitor pollution levels, check water levels, measure noise levels, optimize garbage…
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November 01, 2018
Digital maturity for SMEs

Technological change is happening at an ever-increasing pace. To remain competitive and ensure their future, companies can’t just adopt digital technology; they must embrace it. The mere use of digital tools is not enough: to become “digitally…
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October 24, 2018

From Our Experts

AWS Lambda emulator

Slow Time … It's well-known that there are time thresholds that affect how we perceive work and affect our flow. If a task takes too long to do, we put it aside or drift to something else. For example, in a recent internal project, we were using AWS…
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November 26, 2020
Data Preparation for Machine Learning

The first step in our ML process consists in determining what we want to predict. Once this is established, our second step is “data preparation”. Data preparation, together with features engineering, accounts for most of our ML processing time.
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November 12, 2020
Easy Swag

The swagger / OpenApi documentation standard provides an easy way to help developers use your REST API. Python offers multiple modules to help you generate the swagger doc, and though they already make your life easier, there is always room to make…
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November 05, 2020
“Resto”, a Python module to test the web back-end of a RESTful API

I strongly believe that if something isn’t tested, then it probably won’t work. On the other hand, since writing tests can be tedious, any tool to help speed up and simplify testing is always welcome. In a recent project, I had to write the back-end…
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October 29, 2020
Solving the problems with the “futures” in C++

Today’s high core-count processors require parallel algorithms for programs to run fast. To achieve this, asynchronization and future values are not a reliable solution.
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October 15, 2020
Multithread Wrap

One of the challenges of writing multithreaded code is that it is often necessary to share data that was not designed to be used by multiple threads at the same time. In this blog post, I want to show two approaches to protect such data: duplication…
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October 08, 2020
Django under the influence: a Flask developer’s perspective

When a pythonista devoted to Flask finds himself one day forced to use Django, a framework he used to treat with a bit of disdain until then, he realizes that yes, the grass may sometimes be greener on the other side. Riziq tells us his story:
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September 30, 2020
Scaling JMeter to load test AWS servers

JMeter is a Java-based performance testing tool that challenges the user’s ability to grind the Java beans to extract the best from the tool. Our goal was to configure JMeter to put AWS servers to the test and ensure that enough load was generated…
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September 24, 2020
Using Amazon Simple Email Service

In the course of an internal project, I was charged with exploring Amazon’s email services. In this article, I’ll be sharing what I learned about the Amazon Simple Email Service (SES) features: sending, bounces, out-of-office messages, complaints…
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September 15, 2020
A day in the life of a software developer

Software is now an integral part of our daily lives: not a day goes by that we don’t use an on-line shopping platform, a mobile application, an ATM, a self-serve check-out at the grocery store, and so on and so forth.
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June 05, 2020
Golfing with Dict

Code golf is usually all about the briefness of the code. This code golf will be a bit different: it will be about code size, speed and efficiency. 
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April 23, 2020
Design UI: 10 good reasons to choose Figma

Web designers have a choice of tools to develop web sites, like Sketch, Adobe XD, Invision Studio, or Figma, to name a few. Each has its own strengths and features, but, in my humble opinion, one of them is superior to the others. You guessed it:
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April 16, 2020
Optimizing Shared Data

The first rule of optimization is “don’t do it”. However, once you’ve made your code as clear as it can be, written all your unit tests and verified that the actual product works, you’re sometimes left with underwhelming performances.
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April 09, 2020
A List Widget of Widgets in Qt

Qt is a very flexible and complete tool. That flexibility has its limits, though, and sometimes the Qt documentation can lead one down dead-ends. That is what happened to me recently. All I wanted to do was to put some buttons and text fields in a…
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March 25, 2020
10 best practices for highly-readable code

It is a fact that code is read far more often than it is written. This is why it is so important to make it readable. 
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February 13, 2020
Setting up an octo-boot on a Mac (part 1)

Background … As a hands-on IT director in a mid-sized company like mine, I have to come to terms with the fact that some users are bound to use Apple products and that they are most likely going to end up asking for our help. Given this fact, we…
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February 06, 2020
The 3 main steps of Machine Learning

Machine Learning (ML) is used in Artificial Intelligence (AI) as well as in Analytics and Data Science. There are three types of machine learning: Supervised Learning, Unsupervised Learning and Reinforcement Learning. Supervised Learning: With…
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January 22, 2020
My favourite Visual Studio tips and tricks

François shares 17 tips and tricks to be efficient in Visual Studio.
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December 05, 2019
Mapping 301 Redirects

Imagine that you are in the final stages of moving into a new apartment, and you have just unpacked the last box. You surrendered the keys to your former landlord over a week ago, but you only now realize that you forgot to update your address. If…
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November 28, 2019
What is an Agile Test Plan?

And why it’s so important to have one before starting a testing process.
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October 03, 2019
Piloting a boat with an Android application

Spiria employees are encouraged to spend some time at work on pet projects that support skills development. One of these projects, dreamt up by developer Marc Tesson, was to pilot a radio-controlled boat through an Android application. A team of…
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August 29, 2019
Face recognition by principal component analysis

In this article, June from Spiria Toronto explains the basics of facial recognition using the principal component analysis method.
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July 18, 2019
Debugging Superpowers

Do you use Typescript with Node and Express? Ivan Djokic explains his debugging strategy, one that makes him a superhero:
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July 04, 2019
Understanding the Internet, Part 3: Practical Applications

After explaining the mysteries of IP addresses and how domain names work, Jacques Morrisseau explains how to take advantage of this knowledge on a daily basis.
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June 17, 2019
From Virtual Machines to Containers

Ismaayl explains how the containerization arrival makes it possible to improve the use of physical infrastructure:
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May 23, 2019
Understanding the Internet, Part 2: Domain names

Having explained the mysteries of IP addressing and ports, Jacques Morrisseau now explains how domain names work and what exactly are DNS, TLD, FQDN, URL, etc.
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May 16, 2019
Quality assurance: to automate or not to automate?

Over the last five years, automated testing has significantly evolved. Many automation companies have appeared, developing tools and environments that make automation more accessible. Open-source tools and frameworks have emerged, supported by huge…
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April 25, 2019
Easy combo box in list under Qt

Qt is a powerful framework for building desktop application user interfaces. However, when you need information on how to achieve a particular goal, it is sometimes difficult to gather it. It can be frustrating to feel that the solution is close at…
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April 18, 2019
Hiding foreground services notifications in Android

In this article, Mathieu explains how to obtain a foreground process without a permanent user notification.
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April 11, 2019
Tutorial: How to create a form in ProcessWire

Form programming in ProcessWire is not complicated, but poorly documented. Guy Verville illustrates the use of the Form API through example:
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March 21, 2019
Understanding the Internet, Part 1: IP addressing and ports

The Internet can sometimes seem profoundly obscure or magical. However, at its core, it is an information delivery system, functioning a bit like a package delivery service. In fact, I will use the analogy of the postal service to explain the…
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March 06, 2019
The evolving role and skills related to quality assurance

Test automation and script writing are becoming central to quality assurance. Jean Godard tells us more.
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February 27, 2019

Tech news in brief

E2EE for Android Messages

Google has begun rolling out end-to-end encryption (E2EE) for Rich Communication Service (RCS), the text-messaging standard the industry giant is pushing as an alternative to SMS. E2EE guarantees the complete privacy of messages, even against the…
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November 20, 2020
Intel NUC M15

Intel has launched a laptop under its NUC program (Next Unit of Computing). This means that you won’t be able to buy it directly from Intel, nor will it be stamped with the Intel logo. Instead, the NUC laptops will be sold to boutique shops that…
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November 19, 2020
Nvidia GeForce Now on iOS

GeForce Now, Nvidia’s cloud-based gaming service, is now available as a Web app in beta form, which means that it can work with iOS without going through the despotic App Store. The service’s more than 5 million registered users can fire up GeForce…
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November 19, 2020
Learn to play with Roli

Lumi is a tiny electronic keyboard with just two octaves and keys that light up to help you learn to play the piano in a fun way. It connects through Bluetooth to a tablet or phone that displays, Guitar Hero-style, the keys you should be pressing…
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November 18, 2020
Faster Chrome

Google has announced major performance enhancements to the company’s Chrome browser. The first has to do with tabs. Chrome now will prioritize your active tab over the others in the background, “reducing CPU usage by up to 5x and extending battery…
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November 17, 2020
macOS 11.0 Big Sur

The day Apple delivered its final version of Big Sur, Andrew Cunningham released his traditional Ars Technica review (link below) which exhaustively details every aspect of the new system. At over 20,000 words long, the article should keep you…
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November 12, 2020
Apple M1

The Mac Mini ARM that was shipped to developers after WWDC 2020 had a A12Z chip, the same as the iPad Pro. This seemed to indicate that the next generation of Mac ARMs would come with some variant of the chips that power its telephones and tablets.
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November 11, 2020
Project Taara

The Taara project, initiated by Alphabet, Google’s parent company, provides Internet connectivity over light beams. Tested in Kenya, the technology can cover distances of up to 20km and transmit bandwidth of up to 20Gb/s, enough for thousands to…
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November 10, 2020
Teslaquila? ¡Ay, caramba!

Elon Musk, a fun-loving guy who doesn’t always turn down a drink, or even a smoke, has launched a new Tesla spin-off product: tequila. And not just any old tequila: the 750ml bottle of tequila añejo is retailing for USD250 on Tesla’s website. An…
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November 09, 2020
Return of Fortnite on iOS

Thanks to the cloud, platform-related gaming differences are becoming more nebulous. This is why Fortnite could come back to iOS through a more circuitous route: the on-line gaming platform GeForce Now. The Nvidia service hasn’t yet been announced…
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November 06, 2020
GitHub source code on… GitHub

Developer and privacy activist Resynth1943 announced that GitHub’s source code had been leaked on GitHub itself, in GitHub’s own DMCA repository. But in actual fact, the upload in question was actually of GitHub Enterprise Server, not the GitHub…
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November 06, 2020
Razer Book 13

The boundary between gaming and work computers is getting blurry, to the point that brands like Razer, which have traditionally targeted gamers, are now making forays into the productivity market. And oftentimes, all you need to do is to give up the…
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November 05, 2020
DJI Mini 2

The latest version of the DJI Mini essentially vaults from 2.7K 25/30 fps video to 4K 60 fps. Also importantly, WiFi technology is traded in for OcuSync 2.0 proprietary transmission technology, increasing communication distance from 4km to 10km.
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November 05, 2020
Raspberry Pi 400

Old-timers will remember the days, back in the 70s and 80s, when most consumer PC were a unit with an integrated keyboard. Remember the TRS-80, the Atari 400/800, the TI 99/4, the Apple II, the Commodore 64, the Sinclair ZX, the Amstrad CPC, the…
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November 02, 2020
Aerox 3 mouse

SteelSeries has released a new family of mice for gamers. The wired Aerox 3 costs USD60, and the tail-less version, USD100. Available as of November 10, these game-changing mice are the first to receive an IP54 rating, making them practically water-…
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October 29, 2020
Xbox Series X fridge up for grabs

Since the release of the Xbox Series X almost a year ago, the Internet has been rife with sardonic references to its fridge-like size. So Microsoft doubled down and actually created an Xbox Series X fridge, proving that the console is, in fact, much…
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October 28, 2020
Die, IE! Die!

Are you STILL using Internet Explorer? If so, life as you know it is about to end, since Microsoft has finally and mercifully decided to put an end to its agony (IE’s). And to forestall backsliding, Microsoft will make it impossible to access…
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October 28, 2020
Starlink Beta

On Monday evening, SpaceX began sending out email invitations to a few lucky Americans and Canadians to its Starlink public beta, a programme that aims to eventually provide world-wide Internet coverage from space. To be part of the trial, dubbed…
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October 27, 2020
Zoom safer for all

Zoom’s end-to-end encryption (E2EE) has arrived, letting both free and paid users secure their meetings so that only participants, not Zoom or anyone else, can access their content. Zoom says E2EE is supported across its Mac, PC, iOS, and Android…
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October 27, 2020
PS5 for playing and streaming

Sony’s next console is going to be much more than a plain video-game system. In a blog post on Thursday, the company confirmed that several popular streaming services like Apple TV Plus, Amazon Prime Video, Disney Plus, Hulu, MyCanal, Netflix…
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October 22, 2020
Datacenter in a box

After its underwater data center coup, Microsoft unveiled a modular data center that can be deployed to remote areas, as well as a partnership with SpaceX to connect those data centers to high-speed Internet through Starlink’s constellation of low…
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October 22, 2020
Windows 10 Fall update

On Tuesday, Microsoft released its Windows 10 October 2020 update. Like last year, this second yearly update looks more like an old-fashioned Service Pack than a major new release of the operating system. However, Microsoft has made a few…
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October 21, 2020
Acer + Porsche Design

Acer has teamed up with Porsche Design to create a new, high-end laptop, the Porsche Design Acer Book RS. Under the hood, the machine has a 11th Gen Intel Core i5 or i7 processor, 8 or 16GB of RAM and 512GB or 1TB of storage. As for the GPU, you…
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October 21, 2020
Intel is selling its SSD business

Intel is selling its SSD business to South Korean company SK Hynix in a deal worth $9 billion, which will see the chipmaker almost completely exit the flash memory and storage business — except for Intel’s high-end Optane 3D XPoint non-volatile…
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October 20, 2020
Playing Vivaldi

Vivaldi is a great Chromium-based browser that you must really give a try. And the fact that it now comes with a built-in game may just tip you over the edge! The game, called Vivaldia, is a retro side-scroller set in a cyberpunk universe. It is…
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October 15, 2020
AI for the seeing impaired

Microsoft’s AI researchers have achieved a significant breakthrough with a new image description model which, in certain tests, is more accurate than a human in describing the contents of a photo. This feat will no doubt be applauded by the blind…
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October 14, 2020
Doom for dinner

Using Microsoft’s xCloud service and a little ingenuity, Richard Mallard has managed to get Doom Eternal running on a Samsung smart fridge. The trick was to sideload the Android version of the Xbox Game Pass app onto his fridge. The video of this…
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October 13, 2020
T2 security vulnerability

A recently released jailbreak tool is letting anyone exploit a vulnerability on the more recent Macs to bypass Apple’s trusted T2 security chip and gain deep system access. While Apple may be able to slow down potential hackers, the flaw is…
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October 12, 2020
Facebook saves Bletchley Park

Facebook is donating 1.2 million pounds sterling (CAD2.05 million) to Bletchley Park, the UK computing museum. Bletchley Park’s finances have suffered since the beginning of the crisis, with a revenue shortfall of £2 million due to plummeting…
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October 12, 2020
Unreal Engine on-board

Talk about diversifying in new directions! Fortnite creator Epic Games is partnering with General Motors to use its Unreal Engine game development platform to build in-car software. The first car to use Unreal Engine’s human-machine interface (HMI)…
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October 08, 2020
RyZen 5000 series

AMD CEO Lisa Su announced a new family of processors for desktops, the RyZen 5000 series, replacing the 3000 series launched in May 2019. Four new processors, based on Zen 3 architecture, were shown: the 16-core RyZen 9 5950X (USD800), the 12-core…
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October 08, 2020
PS5 teardown

It seems that Sony beat iFixit to the punch by making their own teardown video of its PlayStation 5 console, long before its launch, scheduled for November 12. In the video, in Japanese with English sub-titles, Yasuhiro Ootori, VP of mechanical…
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October 07, 2020