Peter Brouwers, Author at bol.com Techlab

Let’s get Ethical

“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…

Sociotechnical Architecture to maximize impact

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 24-09-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Innovation teams software engineering customer centric Sociotechnical Architecture Software Architect velocity

In this episode, we touch a field that we don’t explore that much, Architecture. To be more precise: Sociotechnical Architecture to maximize impact. In a way, it’s strange since Peter Paul has worked as an architect for quite a while. On the website of our guest, esilva.net, it’s called “co-design organizational and technical systems to maximize impact”. We think there is so much to explore in these words Sociotechnical Architecture so we asked Eduardo to join this show. <picture source> We discuss what it is and also, why it is…

Moving to multilingual, first step Wallonia

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 16-09-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: scale multilingual French Wallonia Ownership Consistency App First

Bonjour ! Félicitations messieurs, il y a seulement deux semaines, que le bol.com application multilingue est disponible dans les app-stores. That’s how we started this episode. Congratulate our guests with the launch of the multilingual bol.com app. It was launched in the French-speaking part of Belgium, Wallonia. With this launch, over 5 million French-speaking Belgians were able to shop in their native language. In this episode, we dive into this move to multilingual that started two years ago. After the ‘why’ and ‘when’ we go into the ‘how’. From both…

Moving to multilingual, first step Wallonia

Site Reliability Engineering; that’s music to my ears!

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 10-09-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Agile Innovation devops SRE Software Development Operations Site Reliability Engineering SLI SLO SLA

Site Reliability Engineering, or SRE, is seen by a lot of people as the next logical step in developing DevOps capabilities. SRE takes concepts from software engineering and puts them to use in an operations context. Over the last 3 years, we have been experimenting with SRE approaches and gradually integrating them into our DevOps way of working. In this episode, we share the experience we gained on our journey. Guests Bart Enkelaar; Software Engineer and SRE advocate in bol.com and external speaker and friend of the show (SRE during…

Site Reliability Engineering; that’s music to my ears!

Shifting gears to maximize your personal productivity

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 3-09-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: skills teams Personal Productivity OKR North Star

Welcome back after the summer holidays! Hope you were able to enjoy an awesome break. We took some time to prepare some great podcast episodes for you. Holidays, always a nice moment to reflect on things. One of the things might be your personal development and productivity. Saying yes to too many things, do these things add to my personal development, how do you keep track on all these commitments, how do you ensure you don’t drown and eventually don’t be productive at all. Sounds familiar to you these questions?…

Shifting gears to maximize your personal productivity

Simulation, building the digital twin of our warehouse on experiments

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 29-07-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: DataScience Innovation BFC Warehouse Experiment Simulation Digital Twin

In this episode, we take another look, a fresh perspective on Data Science for Logistics. In earlier episodes, we talked about related topics like Forecasting and crafting a Picking Algorithm using Data Science. With the guests of this episode, we dive into two specific challenges in the warehousing domain, the cost-based selection is the first one and the second is put-away with simulation as the red line. During the recording, we found out that our guests have a big dream: realizing the Digital Twin of the bol.com fulfilment centre. But…

Simulation, building the digital twin of our warehouse on experiments

Looking back at 55 episodes

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 16-07-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Community Culture Retro Tech Community

We changed roles for this unique episode. And why is that? We are going to look back on the first 55 episodes. So, Peter Paul and Peter will be the guests of this show and Niels Kuiper and Bruno Lauwers will be your host. Our motto is ‘sharing is caring’. So, practise what you preach and share the podcast journey as well. That was what we had in mind. We share how it all started over a year ago. We dive into the learnings and memorable moments. We were asked…

Love your logging

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 9-07-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Java Web scale Microservices devops YBIYRIYLI logging non-functional Metrics tracing

When it comes to developing software we use the adagio: You built it, You run it, You love it. Same should hold for all the -ilities or non-functional requirements. So, one should love their logging. One of the subjects that we did not really touch yet in our podcast is non-functionals. Today we take a closer look at logging. An aspect that typically fills some of the non-functionals or -ilities. Love your logs and Love the people after you. For the first time in the history of the bol.com Techlab…

Great products are build on a great Product Architecture

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 2-07-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Architecture Agile Innovation Agile@scale Product

Today we explore our product architecture. We have been talking with Jim van de Waal about product organizations. We spoke to our Agile at Scale friends about product organisations and Agile at Scale. Now it is time to talk about the foundation to build these on. We call this the product architecture. We believe that a lot of companies are in the same transformation. Years ago we dealt with a ‘monolith architecture’. We transformed this architecture in a ‘microservices architecture’. And now it’s time for the next logical step in…

Great products are build on a great Product Architecture

Women in tech encourage inclusion in tech

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 24-06-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Culture Diversity Inclusion Women in Tech

Update 11th march 2021 This week started with the International Womens Day. #ChooseToChallenge #IWD2021 We wanted to start a new experiment so that’s why we started the experiment with this episode. We want to add automated transcription to our posts. Podcasts are a great way to share knowledge but unfortunately people who are deaf or hearing impaired are excluded. That is not what we want. Introduction Once again we are sharing our diversity and inclusion stories. We discuss how women in tech at bol.com encourage inclusion in tech. The idea…