Dealing with Technical Debt – an experiment

     Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 10-12-2019
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    One of the aspects that keep popping up in software development: Technical Debt. Some created on purpose, for example, to get features into production fast. Some just came into existence… So, what is Technical Debt? And how to fight it. According to the definition* it can be compared to monetary debt. If technical debt is not repaid, it can accumulate ‘interest’, making it harder to implement changes later on.   A couple of weeks ago George approached us and said, it might be an interesting topic to discuss because in my team an…

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    Dealing with Technical Debt – an experiment

    How we tame Google Cloud resources with R2D2

     Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 4-12-2019
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    How we tame Google Cloud resources with R2D2. We had some episodes on the cloud already. Now it’s time to discuss how bol.com combines the promises of the cloud and their requirements for Reproducibility and Reliability. For instance, balance infinite resources and ultimate autonomy with security. Within bol.com we developed R2D2. R2D2 stands for our Reproducible Resource Deployment Definition tool which combines the functions of Terraform, Cloud SDK and Puppet Labs. It helps us to ensure Recovery, Security, Self-service, Stability and Scalability in our move to the cloud. The reason…

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    How we tame Google Cloud resources with R2D2

    Hackathon

     Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 27-11-2019
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    The angle for this episode of our podcast is hackathons. At the time of the recording, there was one going on in our headquarters in Utrecht. What is a hackathon? Why do we organise them? And we talk about some of the initiatives at the current hackathon. The results of the hackathon were showed during the demotime a week after the hackathon. Out of the 20 projects the jury came up with a top 3 and handed over the cup. Guests Kardelen Hatun – Software engineer in the Retails Platform…

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    Hackathon

    Young Professional Program

     Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 20-11-2019
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    In this episode, we talk about growing talent. We dive into how we approach this as bol.com in our Young Professional Program. Also called YPs. On our recruitment web site, we call this “the IT journey of a lifetime”. Is that just marketing or is there more to it?  Guests Bojan Filipovic; software engineer in team Bond, in the content fleet. Just graduated from the young professional program.  Martin Cekodhima; software engineer in 4B – financial processing – even sexier than Bond. It’s FinTech in an e-commerce company, need we…

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    Young Professional Program

    The state of Reactive Streams

     Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 14-11-2019
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    The state of Reactive Streams – watch the presentation and listen to the podcast. International Keynote speaker Oleh Dokuka gave a presentation on the state of Reactive Streams at bol.com. We took advantage of this opportunity and interviewed him for the podcast. The Reactive Streams specification is state of the art for asynchronous, non-blocking data streams with the fine-grained flow control. Clearly, that was done for a good future… but, does it have any future nowadays? How other programming ecosystems reacted to the appearance of the reactive-streams standard and did they adopted that…

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    The state of Reactive Streams

    Women in Tech

     Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 7-11-2019
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    This episode is on women in tech. Our guests are two speakers at the upcoming European Women in Tech Conference later this month in Amsterdam. To be honest, if we look at the hosts of this podcast and if we look at our guest list of the past episodes… It is still a subject that requires attention. In an earlier episode we talked about diversity in terms of cultural aspects and in this episode we might find out what the women/men diversity brings into tech. At least that was the idea when we started.…

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    Women in Tech

    UX Research to support the partners on our platform

     Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 1-11-2019
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    In this episode, we talk about User Interfaces (UI) and User Experience(UX). Since this is a very visible topic, everybody has an opinion on it. Even though I’m not working on our webshop I get unsolicited feedback on a regular basis. Where a lot of the UX Design discussion focuses on our webshop. We choose another focus for this episode. The UI that is not common to most of our users but is very much needed for a large part of our 23.000 plaza partners. The Seller DashboarD or SDD in short. The User…

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    UX Research to support the partners on our platform

    The Road to Devoxx

     Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 23-10-2019
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    In this episode, we talk about a way to be inspired and inspiring others, learn from each other and grow your network: Conferences! And more in detail our colleague’s road to Devoxx Belgium 2019. At bol.com we are challenged to present our stories inside and outside bol.com. Inside bol.com we have our great Spaces Summit and meetups, Outside we speak at several conferences. That seems more challenging to a lot of colleagues. Especially if it is a conference of 5 days, over 200 speakers and sessions and over 3200 attendees. And our…

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    The Road to Devoxx

    Prepare for the most wonderful time of the year – Season Readiness

     Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 16-10-2019
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    In this episode we dive deeper into the IT aspects of a business topic. How to prepare for the peak load of the season – Black Friday, Sinterklaas, Christmas and even Singles Day is included. That is traditional a period where the load of basically everything increases dramatically. The slogan of the Season Readiness project that is preparing for all this is “Deliver careless holidays for our customer”. During this period every piece of the puzzle must fit. When load triples items like scaling, reliability, page load-times, predictability, up-times and…

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    Prepare for the most wonderful time of the year – Season Readiness

    Small Web Apps

     Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 10-10-2019
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    Our Small Web Apps or SWAPs, in short, are something like the SOA for Front-End. We aim for separate deployable parts of the Front-End we have available for our Plaza partners, suppliers and internal users. In the Front-End we also encountered that we had teams waiting for each other before they could bring functionality to Pro. Basically, because the Front-End became a monolith. Besides that, people realized that we needed to deliver the same functionality in different Front-Ends. For instance content management for our internal product managers and for our external sellers (Plaza…

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    Small Web Apps