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

Everybody is a UX Researcher

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 17-01-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: UX Innovation research customer centric user

In this episode, we talk to Marieke and Tadeusz since we were intrigued by the title of their meetup presentation: Everybody is a UX Researcher. Since we didn’t consider ourselves a UX Researcher before we wanted to know more about the subject. And we wanted to find out if being a UX Researcher could also improve our daily professional lives. And in the end, we actually think it can. Hope you enjoy the talk too. Guests In an earlier episode, we talked with Marieke Linssen about the future of voice and…

10 takeaways from KotlinConf

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 8-01-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: skills Kotlin software engineering Podcast KotlinConf

A group of Kotlin enthusiast joined KotlinConf back in December last year in Copenhagen. We invited this group to share their learnings for this conference. Two of the participants are sharing their takeaways from KotlinConf with you. Our first podcast was about the adoption of Kotlin at bol.com. Hope you will also enjoy this episode and our second season. Guests Cas Plattel; Software Engineer in the Fintech domain Oscar Spruit; Software Engineer in the Apps domain Hosts Peter Brouwers Peter Paul van de Beek Shownotes KotlinConf KotlinConf 2019 on youtube

Advent of Code 2019

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 19-12-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Java Software skills gamification software engineering Algorithms Problem solving

The subject of this podcast episode is totally in line with the holiday season. Time for the advent calendars in many different formats. One of these formats is the Advent of Code 2019! The bol.com Tech Community is participating in this event. In this episode, we talk with 2 participants and discover what it is all about. We explore what it could do. Our software engineers see it as a good way to sharpen their problem solving and a good exercise for the upcoming bol.com spaces programming championship. Some become really competitive. Guests Erik…

Dealing with Technical Debt – an experiment

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 10-12-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Technical Debt Software Development Experiment

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…

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
Category: Podcast Tags: Autonomy cloud Infrastructure R2D2

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…

Hackathon

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 27-11-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Software Innovation hackathon Robotics

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…

Young Professional Program

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 20-11-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: skills Culture Engineering Culture Podcast Learn Young Professional Program YP

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…

The state of Reactive Streams

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 14-11-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Java Architecture skills Reactive Reactive Streams Reactor RSocket

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…

Women in Tech

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 7-11-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Community skills way of working Diversity

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.…

UX Research to support the partners on our platform

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 1-11-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: UX Innovation Partners bol.com Podcast platform research portal

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…