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

API development for the retail platform

In this episode of the podcast, we talk about API development for the retail platform. A very important subject for a retail platform like bol.com. Given that we are a platform we have a lot of partners to interact with. To do that in a neat way we need APIs. And as a platform, we are multi-sided so we have to offer different APIs for different groups of users. So a lot of interesting aspects to cover. Guests Jarno Walgemoed; Owner at Sourcelabs; Software engineer with a strong focus on partner API’s…

Redesign for the cloud – horizontal scaling

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 26-09-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Architecture Scalability cloud Podcast redesign

We think “the Cloud” is to broad a subject to handle in one episode of the podcast. That is why we break down our cloud journey in small pieces and go over them in separate episodes. This time we dive into “Redesign for the cloud – horizontal scaling”. In an earlier episode we discussed how we moved our Big Data to the Cloud, in the Cloud as an enabler to becoming more data-driven. When moving applications and services to the Cloud we think about redesigning them, like in this case…

Redesign for the cloud – horizontal scaling

Coaching – more impact with Human Systems Engineering

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 11-09-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Podcast way of working Coaching

In this podcast, we talk with two of our coaches in tech about making an impact on the performance of teams and people. The reference they use to do this is called Human System Engineering. In bol.com we have different types of coaches with different focus areas. Outside tech, or bol.com wide so to say, we have coaches for careers, personal coaches and SPARK coaches. SPARK is our holocracy/network way of working. Burgert joined bol.com recently and was asked to reflect on what he encountered during his first months. We…

Coaching – more impact with Human Systems Engineering

Measuring 2.0 – Streaming measurements

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 6-09-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Web scale Architecture Scalability BigData data Podcast Conversational Measuring recommendations personalization

The big question in this episode is “How can we create 10 million personalized webshops? Tailormade for every one of our customers so it suites their needs best?” In short, the answering is Measuring 2.0. This enables us to measure more accurately how customers are behaving in our webshop. This enables to give them a more personalized experience. We are aiming for a feedback loop of 1 second. So 1 second after and action was performed by a customer in our webshop the data is available for service that handles personalization and recommendations. These…

Formule X – Accelerate your organisation

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 29-08-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Agile Scrum Innovation Organizing Speed Acceleration

In this episode of the podcast, we talk about accelerating organisations. We invited Jurriaan Kamer and Rini van Solingen to our studio. They recently launched their book – Formule X – Hoe zorg je voor extreme versnelling in je organisatie – at bol.com. The English version, How to reach extreme acceleration in your organization, will be available before the holiday season. The subject of the book how to accelerate your organization is closely related to many subjects we talked about in our podcast series. For instance Agile at Scale and Speeding…

Formule X – Accelerate your organisation

Interaction Design – Celebrate Failure

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 21-08-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: UX Innovation skills Podcast Fail Failure Learn

Where do we learn most in our lives? When things that we do succeed, or when we do stuff and they don’t turn out how we expected? They “fail”. Exactly, we can learn a lot from our failures. How does this relate to Tech? Or, to be more precise, how does that relate to the design of the webshop? And how do we know if we succeed or fail, is it a gut feeling or do we learn through structured research? In this episode, we explore the theme of success, failure and learning together with…

Testing in autonomous teams – speed is everything

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 14-08-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Testing Culture Engineering Culture Test automation Podcast

Testing in autonomous teams – speed is everything The role of testers has evolved in the last decade. Test automation has become the norm. So, testers have grown more towards developers. What are the skills they need to succeed? With the rise of autonomous teams and product teams, more and more tasks of testers moved to other roles like developers. What knowledge must be spread over these roles to ensure that we can release to PRO without fearing what will happen? And there have been other evolutions like the one…

Cloud as Enabler to become more data driven

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 7-08-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: BigData DataScience cloud Podcast Business Intelligence

Cloud as Enabler to become more data-driven. The adjective data-driven means that progress in an activity is compelled by data, rather than by intuition, personal experience or a gut feeling. Googling data-driven gives you over 637 mln. results so time to add an extra result to this with this episode. But we wanted to make it more specific. We moved our big data into the cloud and we got some nice insights that we wanted to share. We asked our two guests of this episode to do so. It turned…

‘OK Google…..’ – the future of voice is here

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 31-07-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: cloud Podcast Interaction Design Voice Google

‘OK Google…..’ – the future of voice is here. Everybody with a Google Assistant on their phone or with Google Speakers installed uses this command more and more. It’s even used by radio DJ’s to make fun and just shout out commands to see what’s happening. And you know when people start making jokes with it, it’s becoming a success. There is a future for interaction by voice. Time to talk about this success with our two guests who were part of the team that introduced the future of voice…

Agile at Scale – Reality is complex, don’t expect simple solutions

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 24-07-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Web scale Scalability Agile Scrum Podcast Product teams Agile@scale Flight level Business Agility

Agile at Scale. Ever since we started our journey into Agile and scrum, we have been wondering whether we were on the right path for business and IT agility. Way back when we were with 7 scrum teams scaling wasn’t the most important issue. With our growth came challenges for scaling our agile way of working. We have been on a few plateaus where we were searching for the next step, as have been other companies on the same venture. Today we talk about some of the things we learned…