Blog – 99 articles

Bol.com’s big Data Journey

René Kroon, on 23-11-2021
Category: Architecture, Business Intelligence Tags: BigData gcp Google Bigquery

As techlead on bol.com’s technical platform my responsibilities include how we work with BigQuery. For us it’s not just a way to park a lot of data. It is a place where development teams store their data so that the rest of the business can get their insights and analysis. Our analytics use cases ranges from insights such as margin, price and stock at the product level all the way up to overall corporate performance. While we look back, we also look forward using Machine learning and AI to accurately…

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How to prevent common performance defects with the jPinpoint PMD rules

Nick Tinnemeier, on 18-11-2021
Category: Blog, Development Tags: Java performance PMD jPinpoint

Prevention is better than cure – a fundamental principle of health care that also applies to modern software development. The later a bug surfaces, the more effort it takes to repair. From our own experience we know that this especially applies to performance bugs. So, wouldn’t it be great if we no longer have to cure our application’s poor performance, because we prevent common performance defects? jPinpoint’s PMD rules can do just that. If you followed the Performance Aware Java Coding workshop we have at bol.com, or have seen this…

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The hyped, happening and happened application frameworks and Java runtime @ bol.com

Sajid Mohideen, Nick Tinnemeier, on 6-09-2021
Category: Development

We asked 25 developers, five tech leads and someone “who does unspeakable things with technology” – more commonly known as our principle tech lead which technologies (tools, libraries, language or frameworks) they believe are hyped, happening or happened: hyped – which new technologies are you eager to learn more about this year? happening – are there any exciting technologies you used last year that we should learn this year? happened – did you walk away from any technologies last year? This is what we got back:   This blog post,…

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The hyped, happening and happened tech @ bol.com

Sajid Mohideen, Nick Tinnemeier, on 6-09-2021
Category: Development

Every once in a while we reflect on the technologies we use in our everyday working lives. Which technologies did we pick up recently that made us more productive and our work more fun? Are there any new technologies out there that we could – or should – use to make our working lives even more pleasant? Is there any technology currently slowing us down which we should actually abandon? This time we did not only ask ourselves these questions. We asked 25 developers, 5 tech leads and someone “who…

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The hyped, happening and happened cloud technologies and data storage solutions @ bol.com

Sajid Mohideen, Nick Tinnemeier, on 6-09-2021
Category: Development

We asked 25 developers, five tech leads and someone “who does unspeakable things with technology” – more commonly known as our principle tech lead which technologies (tools, libraries, language or frameworks) they believe are hyped, happening or happened: hyped – which new technologies are you eager to learn more about this year? happening – are there any exciting technologies you used last year that we should learn this year? happened – did you walk away from any technologies last year? This is what we got back: This blog post, which…

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The hyped, happening and happened front end frameworks and web APIs @ bol.com

Sajid Mohideen, Nick Tinnemeier, on 6-09-2021
Category: Development

We asked 25 developers, five tech leads and someone “who does unspeakable things with technology” – more commonly known as our principle tech lead which technologies (tools, libraries, language or frameworks) they believe are hyped, happening or happened: hyped – which new technologies are you eager to learn more about this year? happening – are there any exciting technologies you used last year that we should learn this year? happened – did you walk away from any technologies last year? This is what we got back: This blog post, which…

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The hyped, happening and happened async programming and streaming frameworks @ bol.com

Sajid Mohideen, Nick Tinnemeier, on 6-09-2021
Category: Development

We asked 25 developers, five tech leads and someone “who does unspeakable things with technology” – more commonly known as our principle tech lead which technologies (tools, libraries, language or frameworks) they believe are hyped, happening or happened: hyped – which new technologies are you eager to learn more about this year? happening – are there any exciting technologies you used last year that we should learn this year? happened – did you walk away from any technologies last year? This is what we got back:   This blog post,…

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The hyped, happening and happened programming languages and testing frameworks @ bol.com

Sajid Mohideen, Nick Tinnemeier, on 6-09-2021
Category: Development

We asked 25 developers, five tech leads and someone “who does unspeakable things with technology” – more commonly known as our principle tech lead which technologies (tools, libraries, language or frameworks) they believe are hyped, happening or happened: hyped – which new technologies are you eager to learn more about this year? happening – are there any exciting technologies you used last year that we should learn this year? happened – did you walk away from any technologies last year? This is what we got back:   This blog post,…

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Empowering autonomous experimentation in a scaling enterprise

Fabio Ricchiuti, on 23-06-2021
Category: Development

Introduction Like living organisms, companies need to learn and adapt to an ever-changing ecosystem. As a result of that, we are witnessing a paradigm shift in which domain experts are originating important innovations. They are product managers, engineers, analysts, data scientists rather than C-level executives, who still have the important job of facilitating this huge process. Within bol.com we call this paradigm “Product Organization” and this is shaping our way of working for the next few years. A “Product Organization” consists of a cross-functional structure of product teams. Every team…

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Turning rusty tech into Rust ~ When you need to FTP but don’t want to

Hannes de Jager, on 17-06-2021
Category: Development Tags: Open source Rust FTP

I believe that FTP is due for a makeover because it’s so ancient that few companies want to host it, yet so many customers still want to use it. That’s why fellow techies and I embarked on two open-source projects to develop a modernised FTP server for the cloud called unFTP. In this writeup I tell you about this server and library, how you can use, customise and extend it and finally ask you to help us make it even better by contributing to its Rust codebases. unFTP you say…?…

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