Peter Paul van de Beek, Author at bol.com Techlab

Innovation Rhythm – How to drink less coffee and achieve more

Ever since we recorded the podcast about Agile @ Scale, we wanted some of the people involved again in our show. We care about the topic. Think there is a lot to tell and learn. And it is of interest to a lot of our listeners. That is why at least we think it is awesome that this episode is about Innovation Rhythm – How to drink less coffee and achieve more. In the first Agile@Scale episode we talked about the ‘Why’ of Agile@Scale, the flight levels of Klaus Leopold.…

Innovation Rhythm – How to drink less coffee and achieve more

How is life with Jim van der Waal – Product Manager at Onefootball

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 10-06-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Agile Innovation Product management autonomous teams

Almost a year ago we spoke to Jim van der Waal, a former colleague and now working as a Product Manager at OneFootball. Back then he had just delivered his presentation: “Scary close to autonomous teams” during the Spaces Summit 2019. Recently Jim posted a range of blog posts, with topics like: Product Owner vs. Product Manager: what is the difference? Making SLO’s fast Product Teams: striving for Autonomy & reaching for Business Agility Which triggered questions like: Would the teams be fully autonomous now? How are things with Jim? What did…

How is life with Jim van der Waal – Product Manager at Onefootball

Dealing with stress in the tech sector

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 3-06-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Community Resilience skills way of working

In this episode, we are exploring a topic that is definitely work-related but not that tech-related: Dealing with stress in the tech sector. At bol.com we have at least twice a year an employee engagement survey. Some of the questions are about how the workload is perceived. If you look at the results they differ per domain. So, context is very important. As is being pressured by deadlines. Our guest reached out to us with the following message: “For all of us working in the tech sector most of us…

Spaces Summit goes virtual – Organising our internal tech conference

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 28-05-2020
Category: Culture, Podcast Tags: Conferences Spaces Summit

Spaces Summit in corona time means Spaces Summit goes virtual. Maybe you remember from last year that we have an annual internal tech conference at bol.com. Given the measures, in place, we can’t come together. So, we go for a digital online equivalent. We wanted to know what it takes to organise an event like this? But we found out there’s an even more important step before. It’s getting the answer to the question “what are we going to do?” Many people and organisations who are organizing conferences, meetups, summits…

Spaces Summit goes virtual – Organising our internal tech conference

Using Data Science for Marketing Attribution

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 20-05-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: DataScience Innovation Marketing Marketing Attribution

The topic of this show is exactly why we like to be the hosts of this podcast. We learn a lot about all areas in our business. In this show, we dive into the marketing domain. We will learn about models like multi-touch, lift studies, time decay, and more. We talk about Data Science for Marketing Attribution. Put simply, marketing attribution is the analytical science of determining which marketing tactics are contributing to sales or conversions. And then there is a Data Science twist to this. Guests Ernst Kuiper; Data…

Using Data Science for Marketing Attribution

Opening our Data Treasure Chest with Tableau

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 23-04-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: BigData data Business Intelligence BI Tableau Atscale Bigquery

Turning to business analytics this episode, we discover it’s a broad field. Business Intelligence hasn’t been discussed that much yet in our podcast. So, we are excited to learn more. In an earlier episode, we discussed moving our Big Data platform to the cloud. This blog is described how we move our data platform into the cloud. What tools do we need to get the data out and have all our users use it to their advantage? One of the tools is Tableau and together with our guests of the…

Opening our Data Treasure Chest with Tableau

Python for Tools, Data Science and more

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 15-04-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: BigData DataScience software engineering python programminglanguage Tools

Let’s look at another programming language we use at bol.com: Python. At bol.com we use Python for Tools, Data Science and more. It has been around since 1991. It was created by a Dutch guy: Guido van Rossum. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability. The language’s core philosophy is summarized in the document The Zen of Python (PEP 20), which includes aphorisms such as: Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Readability counts. All well, but what…

Covid-19 Trilogy Part III – Adapting our way of working

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 8-04-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Agile skills way of working WFH Working from Home Adapt WoW

Covid-19 rules the world, so it determines the subjects for our podcast. Just like others, we moved from studio recording to home recording. Basically working from home (WFH) and adapting our way of working. So we think it’s time to spent three smaller episodes on this subject as well and share our experiences. We build up a trilogy which will cover the following subjects: Episode Office Automation: creating the prerequisites for WFH. A peek behind the screen of our Office Automation hero’s. Sharing how they prepared and showed their contribution…

Covid-19 Trilogy Part III – Adapting our way of working

Covid-19 Trilogy Part II – Season Load and season mindset

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 6-04-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Web scale Scalability Community Agile devops way of working Corona Covid-19 WFH Working from Home

Covid-19 rules the world, so it determines the subjects for our podcast. Just like others, we moved from studio recording to home recording. Basically working from home (WFH). So we think it’s time to spent three smaller episodes on this subject as well and share our experiences. We build up a trilogy which will cover the following subjects: Episode Office Automation: creating the prerequisites for WFH. A peek behind the screen of our Office Automation hero’s. Sharing how they prepared and showed their contribution in these uncertain times. Episode Season…