The Magic Behind The Map: the TomTom Engineering Podcast: Recent Episodes

TomTom International BV

125+ million drivers have been supplied with our tech. Ever wondered how we develop our location technology with teams around the globe? The TomTom Engineering Podcast, The Magic Behind The Map, is a podcast made by the engineers of TomTom. Felix Faassen and Rijn Buve discuss topics on software engineering, devops, security, data science, machine learning, open-source, and software engineering culture.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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. 

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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

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