Peter Brouwers – 94 articles

BAPC2020 – Olympic spirit or serious business?

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 4-01-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Culture software engineering Engineering Culture Young Professional Program YP Championship competition BAPC

Introduction No rhythm like algorithms. We have been talking in the podcast about programming contest before. For example, about our own Spaces Championship and Advent of code, which also takes place at the end of the year. Today we’ll be talking to some participants in the BAPC – The Benelux Algorithm Programming Contest. Like stated on the website of BAPC, it is a contest in which about 90 teams from leading universities in Luxemburg, Belgium and The Netherlands participate. The teams have to solve a series of algorithmic problems and…

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A look back at 2020 podcasts

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 29-12-2020
Category: Blog

Time to reflect on season 2 of the bol.com techlab podcast with Peter Paul van de Beek  and Peter Brouwers. Thanks for all the support in 2020 and we love to see you back in 2021 as guest and listener, Happy New Year!  

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The Storybook story

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 18-12-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Testing Development Front-End frontend TDD Mindset frontend development App First Storybook

Introduction It happens a lot that listening to a podcast sparks new questions. So, after our episode on Front-End quality, we wanted to know more about Storybook. This coincided with some people reaching out to us to collaborate in the podcast. And look where we are now: creating a new podcast on this subject. We asked our selves the question: Could it be the holy grail for front end development? Topics discussed: What is Storybook? What problems does it solve? How does it support app development? What does the Add-on…

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Service Mesh – a must have for a dynamic infrastructure

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 3-12-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: cloud kubernetes Infrastructure istio service mesh network

Introduction Weaving a Service Mesh for Multiple Clusters at bol.com – that was the title for the presentation our guests gave during the virtual KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2020 earlier this year. This triggered our curiosity. We have questions like what is this service mesh about? Why do we need it? How did we implement it? Guests Remco Overdijk; Tech Lead Provisioning Fleet / Expert System Engineer at bol.com. You might know him from the episode where we spoke about Kubernetes. James Brook; Cloud Solutions Architect at Google Hosts Peter Brouwers…

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Real Time Sales – In 100ms from sales to dashboard

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 25-11-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Young Professional Culture data RSocket R2DBC Reactive programming Vue3 Kotlin Coroutines dashboard Rapid feedback Sales Real-Time

Introduction One of the purposes of this podcast is to share our unique bol.com culture with you. Traditions play an important part in culture. So, in this episode, we share a view on the evolution of a tradition. A tradition that underlines our focus on data. In this sales season, everybody in bol.com wants to know how we are doing, preferably Real-Time. With the latest version of the Real-Time Sales dashboard, our guests managed to get the information within 100ms from sales to the dashboard. If you are one of…

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To become official F/OSS committer and eventually PMC member

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 19-11-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Community Open source F/OSS

Introduction In this episode we are sharing something that is unique at least in the Tech Community here at bol.com.  To become official F/OSS committer and eventually PMC member. Without spoiling too much, I think this contribution will make a positive impact far beyond the bol.com Tech landscape and serve in an enormous number of companies. Helping engineers all over the planet. Hoping to inspire you as well to become official F/OSS committer and eventually PMC member. Our guest is the first bol.com employee to become official committer to the…

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Proof data consistency in a micro service landscape

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 6-11-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Architecture Microservices data Quality Bigquery Data Consistency

Introduction Even if it doesn’t appeal to you, you might want to think about it when you work in a larger microservice landscape or have a serious big data platform…Proof data consistency in a microservice landscape. When we google this subject I already get 1.2 MLN results so there’s something going on here. To ensure data consistency several practices are available: Saga Pattern Reconciliation Event Log Orchestration vs. Choreography Single-Write With Events Change-First Event-First Consistency by Design Accepting Inconsistency But in this episode, we won’t go over these practices. We…

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Front End Quality in an interactive-heavy application

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 28-10-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Testing Agile UX Development Front-End Quality Test automation Playbook

Introduction In this episode, we show a little of our front-end love. And our love for testing and enjoying the quality of a good front-end. It was time for that because the last time we talked about front end related stuff was quit some episodes ago. We are going to talk about Front End Quality in an interactive-heavy application. First, we discuss two statements/dilemmas: Testing is always balancing. Time vs. Quality: How much time to spent on getting all the cases (interactions) and edge cases clear vs. the level of…

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Behind the Mask – Young Professionals contributing to the online platform for healthcare

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 19-10-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Community Innovation skills support

Today we take a look behind the mask. The moment we recorded this podcast episode the 2nd wave of Corona is hitting The Netherlands. In the first wave, the Corona crisis was causing a lot of pressure and stress on our healthcare system and nurses & caretakers specifically.  With a couple of IT Young Professionals, we are helping a great project called “Behind The Mask”. It is a joint effort of UMC Utrecht, TU Delft and Erasmus MC. The project aims to help nurses maintain mental and physical health by providing an online platform where…

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Let’s get Ethical

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 12-10-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Culture Tech Community Ethics Books

“This is how we do IT”, is the slogan of our Techlab site and podcast. Every now and then we reach out to external guests to learn from them and exchange ideas. We are really happy to have this external guest in our show to talk about “Let’s get ethical”. This multi-talent released her book ‘De bubbel’ mid 2019 after 15 years at Google, Spotify and Booking.com. She writes columns for the Dutch newspaper FD. One of those was the reason for me to reach out and invite her to…

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