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

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

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…

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

Covid-19 Trilogy-part I – How Office Automation set the prerequisites for WFH

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 2-04-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: way of working Corona Covid-19 WFH Working from Home Office Automation

Chaos Engineering – every incident is a missed experiment

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 4-03-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: devops Development Engineering Culture SRE Chaos Engineering

Chaos engineering… mostly in IT we are focused on structure and order. So, what is it and what can it bring? We go over the steps: Start by defining ‘steady state’ as some measurable output of a system that indicates normal behaviour Hypothesize that this steady-state will continue in both the control group and the experimental group Introduce variables that reflect real-world events like servers that crash, hard drives that malfunction, network connections that are severed, etc. Try to disprove the hypothesis by looking for a difference in steady-state between…

Chaos Engineering – every incident is a missed experiment

Crossfit – fit for life and fit for purpose

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 27-02-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Community Coaching Crossfit Carreer

Like the Romans already said: Mens sana in corpore sano. A healthy mind in a healthy body. One sentence in an article from one of our colleagues triggered us: “Prepare for the unknown and unknowable”. We really wondered, how does this help him in his daily job? We talk about crossfit. About ring musle-up or a handstand push-up. Of course we relate it to our daily practise. How do you benefit from it in your job and even in making career decisions. We talk about the value of the community and the…

Crossfit – fit for life and fit for purpose

Utrecht JUG – Test Architectures & Hacking into Java web apps

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 19-02-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Java Testing Meetup Architecture Software devops Security Podcast JUG

We take a sneak peek into the Utrecht JAVA User Group (JUG) Meetup next week, February 24th. Topics will be: are End-to-End test architectures a Dead End road? And there will be some live hacking: Breaking into your Java web app. This will really give a feel for the importance of security. Besides that, we discuss with one of the founders of the Utrecht JUG why it’s so great to be part of a community. He explains the great initiatives like for instance the Speaker Incubator the JUG offers. Guests…

Utrecht JUG – Test Architectures & Hacking into Java web apps

Performance testing the chat app

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 12-02-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Testing Software skills devops performance

With only a few weeks to go to our peak season, we wanted to ensure that the chat app on our webshop was performing up to par. An important part of our customers’ questions is answered via this chat app. You can feel the importance of it to be able to handle a load of questions during our peak season. Both our customers and our customer service experts couldn’t be let down. Given the short notice, we asked Ymor to help us with their knowledge and experience to perform a…

PostgreSQL – Migration and Performance

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 5-02-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: database performance PostgreSQL

This episode has 2 subjects: PostgreSQL migration and performance. The two guests of our show will present during the PostgreSQL User group meetup at bol.com which started shortly after this recording. The topic of the meetup is introduced as PG ConfEU – The Dutch talks. Guests Martijn Dashorst – a software engineer for over 20 years and has worked with various databases over the years, including DB2, Oracle, Sqlserver, SABDB and PostgreSQL. As a Java (enterprise) developer, he has worked in the education sector for over 12 years and developed…

Experimentation – it starts with courage and curiosity

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 29-01-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Agile Innovation skills Experiment Experimentation Mindset

The two guests of our show work in our experimentation team. They set a target at the beginning of 2019: Our goal is to help hundreds of people at bol.com to run experiments (more effectively). So after a year of experimenting, we are very curious about what they learned and achieved. Let’s find out! Guests Denise Visser; Product Manager and Experiment evangelist Maarten Zwart; Software Architect and data enthusiast Hosts Peter Brouwers Peter Paul van de Beek Other things We received feedback on the audio quality. Sometimes it’s hard to…

Experimentation – it starts with courage and curiosity

The Spaces Championship – our code competition

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 23-01-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Community game skills gamification software engineering Algorithms Problem solving

It was briefly mentioned in our episode on Advent of Code. We also started an internal Coding Championship. Spaces Championship. Let’s dive into this and find out what it is all about. From our personal experience, we know that is easier to train and improve when we are in a competition. Could it be that the same mechanism is here at work too? Let us know when you think we should open-up this competition externally as well, goto Linkedin, mailto: techlab@bol.com or twitter us: @bol_com_Techlab Guests Harmen Prins – Software…