PTV is a great company with a lot of excellent engineers. The range of technology used in PTV is wide and the topics vary a lot.
Examples for programming languages and technologies are
C, C++ ,C #, Delphi, Java, JavaScript, several scripting languages, dozens of libraries and frameworks, several database types.
Examples for topics are
optimization algorithms, routing algorithms, tour planning, as well as special topics as toll and emission calculation.
For a development team with more than 150 developers, it is impossible to have a complete insight in all the research and implementing activities. In order to enable a knowledge transfer among all colleagues in development, we introduced a regular talk about any intesting topic.
This “TechTalks” take place every two weeks and last about one hour. A developer explains a certain topic and – if appropriate – shows source code and gives insigjht into his investigations and work.
Every colleague can freely decide whether he attends such a session or not. The average number of visitors for a TechTalk is 30-40.
To give you an example about the topics, here a subset of topics of the last sixth month:
- Toll calulcation – from data to algorithms
- What is “Constraint Programming”?
- Optimization for modern CPU architectures
- Windows Azure
- Windows 8 and what it means for software development
- OpenGeospatial Constortium (OGC)
- The future of traffic information
- Toll scenarios
- Intermodal routing in PTV
As you can see, the “TechTalks” cover a wide range of topics. They are a great opportunity for employees to stay informed and they are an important part of PTVs internal knowledge transfer.
This helps us to improve our software for you, so “TechTalks” have an implicit benefit for our customers: TechTalks may contain confidential information, that’s why we can’t make them public.
(This post was provided by my colleague Christian Mähler, Director Software Development at PTV. Thank you so much, Christian!)
