Blog – 99 articles

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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How to: validate your app’s metrics on a local Grafana instance

Rogier Lommers, on 16-06-2021
Category: Cloud, Infrastructure, Development Tags: Grafana monitoring prometheus

Monitoring your infrastructure is key for keeping production workloads healthy and to debug issues when things are going bad. And like Peter Drucker once said: “if you can measure, you can manage”. At bol.com, we make use of the well-known Prometheus / Grafana stack. Recently I needed to add new metrics to my application. So I opened my visual studio code instance and added a few new measurements. After this, I had the need to validate them, but then I realised I had to push my code changes up to…

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Measuring execution time in Kotlin coroutines

Danu Pranantha, on 11-05-2021
Category: Development Tags: Kotlin Metrics Kotlin Coroutines

1. Background kotlinx.coroutines is one of the asynchronous (and concurrency) libraries in Kotlin for writing asynchronous, non-blocking code. Kotlin coroutines are cooperative subroutines that can suspend and resume their execution at any suspension point (awaiting a result). Coroutines themselves have been around since the 1960s. Coroutines are lightweight cooperative multitasking, often referred to as ‘lightweight threads.’ They yield control upon suspension. Other coroutines can then use it to start/continue their execution. Thus, they don’t depend on a scheduler and operating system. On the other hand, threads are based on the…

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