The Discovery process is an intense collaboration tailored to find relevant and innovative answers to the digital challenges faced by enterprises.
The term “manager” means different things in different fields. In music, for example, the role of a band manager is to ensure ideal conditions for the artists to create and perform, while making sure things don’t fall apart. This involves suggesting…
One of the most satisfying moments in the life of an entrepreneur is when that Idea comes to you; an Idea that will bridge fractured worlds, win over hearts and minds and take your company and your community to a new level. One of the most deflating…
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.
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…
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…
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.
A quick return on investment (ROI) is always the main concern of any prospective client. Sometimes the issue is addressed directly, or it is implied in the conversation, or it is raised by the person tasked with shopping for a development firm, or…
Maestro and Spiria, in collaboration with Oriso, launch Sentinel – a free online questionnaire to help monitor COVID-19 symptoms among construction workers.
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:
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…
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…
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…
For Ivan, playing board games with his colleagues has many more virtues than just fun:
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.
Spiria makes the list of Canada’s 500 fastest-growing companies for the eighth straight year, thanks to employee commitment and client trust.
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”.
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.
Documentation, consistency, reusability, code reviews, unit tests, scalability… processes and standards that make the difference. Kevin from Spiria Toronto tells you more.
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…
Outsourcing software development projects can address some challenges. Discover the 8 benefits of outsourcing in one infographic.
What is the purpose of a product strategy and why is it important? Gita tells us more:
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…
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.
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…
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When you take over a project that’s at an advanced stage of development, or even in production, you can expect a few surprises. And while refactoring should be an integral part of any normal development cycle, it’s not always easy to consider the…
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…
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.
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…
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…
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.
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…
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:
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…
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…
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.
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.
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:
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.
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…
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.
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…
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…
François shares 17 tips and tricks to be efficient in Visual Studio.
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…
And why it’s so important to have one before starting a testing process.
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…
In this article, June from Spiria Toronto explains the basics of facial recognition using the principal component analysis method.
Do you use Typescript with Node and Express? Ivan Djokic explains his debugging strategy, one that makes him a superhero:
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.
Ismaayl explains how the containerization arrival makes it possible to improve the use of physical infrastructure:
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.
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…
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…
In this article, Mathieu explains how to obtain a foreground process without a permanent user notification.
Form programming in ProcessWire is not complicated, but poorly documented. Guy Verville illustrates the use of the Form API through example:
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…
Galaxy Ultra, S21+, S21. © Samsung. Since Samsung can’t keep a secret like Apple can, we knew just about all there was to know about the new family of Galaxy phones long before this week’s official presentation. However, one thing that was a…
Intel is updating its Next Unit of Computing (NUC) lineup of miniature computers with its 11th Gen processors, and it’s again including a gaming-focused model, the NUC 11 Enthusiast. Intel has also added a NUC Pro line and a NUC 11 board meant to be…
Watchy. © Squarofumi. Watchy is a smartwatch with an e-paper screen whose design and software is open-source. Built around an ESP32 SoC, Watchy has a monochrome, 1.54-inch, 200x200 display, 4 buttons, and a 3-axis accelerometer with movement sensor.
Microsoft is upping file size limits on OneDrive, Teams and SharePoint, from 100 to 250GB. This is great news for everyone, but especially teleworkers who need to share large files on the cloud, like 4-or-8K video, CAD files or large scientific…
The well-known maker of gaming computers and accessories already sold cloth masks for USD30, but, ahead of CES, Razer announced a far more ambitious project: a N95 mask with a transparent front to show the mouth (useful for communicating with deaf…
Over the Holidays, one of the most-shared videos was one produced by Boston Dynamics, in which various robots get down to the tune of “Do You Love Me” by the Contours, a hit from 1962, the era of the Twist and the Mashed Potato. As of writing these…
The first Wi-Fi 6E-compatible devices should start hitting the market this year. The Wi-Fi Alliance, the industry-wide group that oversees Wi-Fi, is now starting to certify the first wave of products with support for Wi-Fi 6E, including phones…
A year after Microsoft officially ended support for Windows 7, a determined population of PC users are still hanging on to this operating system launched in 2009. According to ZDNet, at least 100 million PCs are still running on this obsolete…
The Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is an autoregressive language model that uses deep learning to produce texts that could have been written by humans. Not only can it create news articles, but it can also write poetry, and even code.
We thought that after 2020, nothing could surprise us. And yet… At first, we thought it was a hoax, but no, they’re serious. The KFConsole, a joint venture between Kentucky Fried Chicken and Cooler Master, is a PC based on Intel’s NUC 9 with an…
As announced back in 2017, Flash is soon to be a mere memory: Adobe will stop supporting Flash Player on December 31 and block Flash content from running on January 12, 2021. Its days were counted, with countless security holes, poor portability on…
Google has just released its list of top search terms used in its search engine in 2020. Interestingly, you can break down the searches by country. The world’s top search word is, not surprisingly, “coronavirus”, followed by “election results”…
Right on time for the Holidays, Apple has launched the AirPods Max, high-fidelity, wireless headphones that “bring the magic of AirPods® to an over-ear design”. Of course, Apple promises “a breakthrough listening experience” that provides rich, deep…
If you’ve ever used a GPS tracker like a smart watch or phone to track your outdoor exercise, you’ve noticed that your run or cycle through downtown areas is fancifully tracked, while it is far more accurate outside the downtown core or even in…
Unveiled at CES 2020 in January, Razer’s first desktop is finally available for preorder. Based on Intel’s NUC 9 Extreme, the Tomahawk looks like a smallish aluminium box with tempered glass sides. The front slides out like a drawer: just slide it…
This week’s biggest news on planet tech: Salesforce is purchasing Slack for close to 28 billion dollars. The announcement follows a week of rumors and a steep bump in Slack’s value on the stock market in anticipation of the deal being made official.
Qualcomm unveiled the Snapdragon 888, its new 5nm system on a chip (SoC) with 5G technology, which will power just about every new high-end Android phone in 2021. The Kryo 680 CPU is promising performance improvements of 25 percent over last year’s…
Early tests showed just how powerful Apple’s SoC is, and further experiments have just confirmed it. While the ARM64 Windows 10 system isn’t officially supported on the new platform, many hackers have already tried their skills and succeeded. Among…
For the first time ever, Amazon has introduced macOS instances in its AWS cloud. The new “mac1.metal” is not virtualized; it’s actual Mac Minis accessed on Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which will allow developers to build iPhone, iPad and…
Microsoft has started testing a new method of providing its clients with smaller Windows 10 updates outside of the major Spring and Fall updates. This process, branded Windows Feature Experience Pack, is first being tested within the Windows…
The European Union has made a huge stride towards the adoption of stricter rules on the “right to repair” to better protect consumers. The resolution was adopted with 395 in favour and just 94 against, with 207 abstentions. The European Commission…
To cap off 2020 on-brand, Hey email service came up with an idea that set the Internet on fire. Send a heart-felt email to dumpsterfire@hey.com, expressing, for example, your feelings about 2020. Your email will be automatically printed out and the…
Never put all your eggs in one basket, right? Yet that’s exactly what is happening on the Internet with a few increasingly huge and ubiquitous service providers. So when a giant like Amazon Web Services fails, entire regions of the Net are affected.
Samsung on Tuesday announced the Galaxy A12 and A02S, two new entry-level phones set to launch next year in Europe. The A12 is designed to be a successor to the A11, sporting a 6.5-inch HD+ display, an octa-core processor, a fingerprint sensor on…
Announced in 1983 by Bill Gates, the Windows graphical interface for MS-DOS was born on November 20, 1985. At the time, Microsoft sought to satisfy a growing hunger for mouse-driven, multi-window graphical interfaces, a revolutionary novelty that…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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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