By Frederieke Ubels & Feike Groen on 20-07-2017
Category: Development Tags: Architecture Microservices Scalability devops Autonomy
What started out as a means of technical scalability turned out to be the most important driver of team autonomy – and vice versa. This is our story of Backspin, Rabbits and the Man on the Moon.
Read moreBy Roy Jacobs on 23-06-2017
Category: Culture, Development, Events Tags: Conferences Engineering Fun Culture
bol.com has two speeds of operation: “very fast” and “extremely fast”. In this whirlwind it can sometimes be difficult for teams to share knowledge or just talk about things they find interesting. A handful of colleagues decided something needed to be done about this. What better way, they thought, than to just organize an entire conference by themselves?
Read moreBy PeterPaulvandeBeek on 21-06-2017
Category: Blog, Architecture, Development Tags: CQRS Web scale Architecture patterns scale
In this posts, we’ll show you how we use the CQRS “web scale” pattern to achieve scalability and flexibility in our back office software. This is needed as we rely heavily on our back office to offer our customers the best available service.
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By ntinnemeier on 12-06-2017
Category: Blog, Culture, Development Tags: Architecture Microservices database Grafana
How do you get the IT management board to serve you coffee on a golden platter? You have to do something good of course, exceptional in fact. In order to tell you how we became top performer instead of database killer by creative use of a cache, we will have to take you back to December 2015, when it all started.
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By Maurice Zeijen on 11-06-2017
Category: Development, Events Tags: Meetup Event devops
Join us on the 22nd of June at the DevOps Utrecht Meetup! For this meetup we have a talk from Maurice Zeijen about Resilience engineering in a microservice landscape. Brian Engel will close this evening by taking us into the world of the Dutch Police and how they’ve adopted DevOps.
Read moreBy Menno Vis on 26-05-2017
Category: Blog, Culture, Events Tags: Event Agile Conferences Development
Are you going to Agile Amsterdam? Be sure to check out bol.com on the 21st of September! Menno Vis (IT Director) and Mary Gouseti (Software Engineer) will be presenting a hands-on case from 12:00 PM to 12:30 PM (track 1).
Read moreBy Rogier Lommers on 17-05-2017
Category: Blog, Architecture, Development Tags: Golang hackathon crazy client-server gamification distributed go
How can you make sure images don’t slow down your page load performance? All it took us was some unconventional thinking: seti@bol.com.
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By Joost van Wollingen on 16-05-2017
Category: Testing, Events Tags: Testing Meetup tooling
New testing tools are introduced every week it seems, but how new and useful are they really? The search for the ultimate tool seems to be a never ending quest.
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By Menno Vis on 15-05-2017
Category: Blog, Culture, Development Tags: Agile Scrum devops YBIYRIYLI
This is the third post about our growth story. In the last blog post we elaborated on some necessary steps to take in an organizational change. We have explained that the steps bol.com has taken are very much in line with John Kotter’s steps. In this post we will have a closer look at the process in the spaces.
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By Joost van Wollingen on 19-04-2017
Category: Testing, Events Tags: Testing michael bolton skills
What is testing? What is the testing role? Is testing a demonstration that a product fulfills its declared functional requirements? If machinery can be programmed to check hundreds and thousands of functions in a second, do we need testers any more? Michael Bolton – The balance between social & technical skills Michael Bolton says we do, but not so much to check for functional correctness—which arguably should never have been a central part of the tester’s job in the first place. We need people in a testing role to do…
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By Tuan L.D. on 4-04-2017
Category: Blog, Development Tags: Machine Learning Image Recognition
It is not easy, but not unachievable. A post on playing around with image recognition, for seeing the possibilities we can do with it. Technical details are kept as low as possible.
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By Paul Lai on 3-04-2017
Category: Development, Testing Tags: Testing James Bach
James Bach recently ran a Rapid Software Testing (RST) workshop at bol.com and I was fortunate enough to participate in this engaging and informative three-day event. Bach is regarded by many as one of the thought leaders who reshaped the testing industry within the modern software development landscape (alongside Michael Bolton).
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By ir. drs. Niels Basjes on 30-03-2017
Category: Development Tags: Java Open source UX DataScience
Ever since I’ve started working for a WebAnalytics company in 2005 I’ve been working on problems related to making sense of web data. One of the most difficult elements in this type of analysis is making sense of the user agent.
Very often the raw web data I work with is stored in Apache HTTPD access log files that have been compressed using gzip.
By Thatiana Mendes on 29-03-2017
Category: UX, Development Tags: Event UX
Last Wednesday we had an inspiring evening at bol.com. We held Ladies that UX Utrecht meetup as part of our bol.com campaign Women in Tech*. Ladies that UX Utrecht is an existing group that brings together women that have passion for User Experience Design, tech and digital, positively promoting and teaching each other. They gladly brought two uplifting presentations to the 45 people in the audience. Before it everybody enjoyed a nice dinner and got prepared for what was coming after.
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By Menno Vis on 27-03-2017
Category: Culture, Development Tags: Agile Scrum
This is the second post about our growth story. In the first blog post we introduced our Man on the Moon program; how we plan to manage a fast growing company like ours. In this second part we’ll explain how we have involved all stakeholders and participants in our journey to the moon. Also, we’ll share what has inspired us and how this has helped us to set our own direction.
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By ir. drs. Niels Basjes on 22-03-2017
Category: Architecture, Development Tags: Scalability BigData
At bol.com we service millions of products to millions of customers, resulting in billions of pages each year. We want to create the most effective service to our visitors we possibly can. So we spent a lot of time preparing the content, monitoring the systems and analyzing how we can support our customers better in finding what they really want.
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By Joost van Wollingen on 21-03-2017
Category: Development, Testing Tags: Testing Meetup James Bach
We hosted the Techlab meetup on the 15th of March, which was a very well visited evening. James kicked off the night in style by speaking about the future of the testing role. He also went into detail on what skills make testers unique and that readiness to pick up tasks is crucial to be able to do a task well. Click read more to see the video!
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By Thatiana Mendes on 20-03-2017
Category: Culture, Development Tags: Event Partners bol.com hackathon game
Today we had our third edition of Let partners shine. Around 50 bol.comer’s – among them software engineers, test engineers, information analysts, UX designers and business analysts – got together for the whole day to participate in this competition. The idea was to fix and improve little interactions that cause frustration for the users in the partner platform.
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By Dgiesen on 16-03-2017
Category: Blog, UX, Development Tags: UX Beta Innovation
Bol.com starts an online test environment called beta.bol.com. It is a way to test and experiment quickly with new (technical) ideas and concepts in order to improve the shopping experience of the customer. This new environment is opened in order to speed up the innovation process from idea to realization, and fills up the gap between user research (N = 1) and A/B testing (N = >100k).
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By Joost van Wollingen on 14-03-2017
Category: Testing Tags: Testing Community Tribes Guild Goals
Everybody wants to stay ahead of the game. It is no different for the bol.com testing community. Ever wondered how we manage to do that? In this post I gladly share how bol.com test engineers keep challenging and inspiring each other.
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By Hans van Buuren on 6-03-2017
Category: Development Tags: Responsiveness
Bol.com features a fully responsive online store that adjusts its look and feel to the type and capabilities of the device and browser you’re using. This enhances usability, speed and conversion.
Read moreBy Menno Vis on 1-03-2017
Category: Culture Tags: Agile Scrum
From a small online book store to an e-commerce platform with 7 million customers. That’s the short version of the bol.com story so far. This is the first post from a series through which we would like to share our growth story. These posts are written by Roy Gielen, an agile enabler who interviewed several persons at bol.com on this topic.
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By Oscar Westra van Holthe - Kind on 7-02-2017
Category: Development Tags: Architecture Software Maintenance
Software maintenance can be hell. I’m sure that many developers have opened up an existing codebase, only to be greeted with a plethora of packages. You can usually see in excruciating detail the kinds of classes the software has. Any features implemented by the software are obfuscated. And once you slowly, ever so slowly, get to know the software, it gets worse: all those packages have a more or less good reason to exist. This means refactoring bit by bit (the boy scout rule) only makes the situation worse, and…
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By Roy Jacobs on 7-02-2017
Category: Development Tags: Hazelcast Java
When you build a service at bol.com your responsibility doesn’t end once the build is green. You’re actually supposed to run it (and keep it running) in production, too. Luckily, our team doesn’t have to do this all by ourselves: there are platform and infrastructure teams to turn to and other development teams to harass over coffee. It’s a bit like caring for a newborn baby I suppose: you try to do a lot yourself but when the baby starts crying for the first time you’ll need all the help…
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By Volkan Yazici on 7-02-2017
Category: Diversity Tags: Expat International
While working abroad as an expat might sound like an exciting opportunity with noteworthy advantages, “adaptation” constitutes the dominant factor of the entire challenge. Which language will you use for communication? What about cultural differences? To what extent will you socially get accepted by the community? And what will you be leaving behind by accepting the offer? And don’t forget the other side of the coin: almost all of these questions can be applicable to the native (Dutch) employees currently employed. I have been working at bol.com as a software…
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