Prepare for the most wonderful time of the year – Season Readiness

By Peter Brouwers on 16-10-2019
Category: Blog, Architecture, Culture, Podcast, Infrastructure, Development, Testing Tags: Peak Season Peak Sinterklaas Santa Claus Black Friday Singles Day Load testing SRE

In this episode we dive deeper into the IT aspects of a business topic. How to prepare for the peak load of the season – Black Friday, Sinterklaas, Christmas and even Singles Day is included. That is traditional a period where the load of basically everything increases dramatically. The slogan of the Season Readiness project that is preparing for all this is “Deliver careless holidays for our customer”. During this period every piece of the puzzle must fit. When load triples items like scaling, reliability, page load-times, predictability, up-times and…

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Small Web Apps

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 10-10-2019
Category: Podcast, UX Tags: Architecture Front-End Podcast

Our Small Web Apps or SWAPs, in short, are something like the SOA for Front-End. We aim for separate deployable parts of the Front-End we have available for our Plaza partners, suppliers and internal users. In the Front-End we also encountered that we had teams waiting for each other before they could bring functionality to Pro. Basically, because the Front-End became a monolith. Besides that, people realized that we needed to deliver the same functionality in different Front-Ends. For instance content management for our internal product managers and for our external sellers (Plaza…

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API development for the retail platform

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 3-10-2019
Category: Blog, Architecture, Podcast, Development Tags: Architecture Development API Podcast 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…

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Redesign for the cloud – horizontal scaling

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 26-09-2019
Category: Blog, Architecture, Cloud, Podcast, Infrastructure, Development 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…

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Refactoring your code

By Jasper van Heijst on 17-09-2019
Category: Blog, Architecture, Development Tags: Software Refactor

It’s common sense of course to keep your codebase clean all the time, but this isn’t always the case. It simply happens that a codebase grows in ways that were not foreseen on forehand resulting in an unclear architecture or dirty code (that must be the opposite of clean code). In this article I’d like to share our experience in dealing with such a situation, why we needed to refactor, what we did and how it improved our codebase. Why you need to refactor Modern software engineering is an agile…

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Coaching – more impact with Human Systems Engineering

By Peter Brouwers on 11-09-2019
Category: Blog, Diversity, Culture, Podcast, Development 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…

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Measuring 2.0 – Streaming measurements

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 6-09-2019
Category: Architecture, Podcast, Development 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…

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Formule X – Accelerate your organisation

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 29-08-2019
Category: Blog, Architecture, Culture, 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…

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Interaction Design – Celebrate Failure

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 21-08-2019
Category: Podcast, Interaction Design, Interaction Design, UX 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…

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Testing in autonomous teams – speed is everything

By Peter Brouwers on 14-08-2019
Category: Culture, Cloud, Podcast, Development, Testing, Events 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…

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Cloud as Enabler to become more data driven

By Peter Brouwers on 7-08-2019
Category: Blog, Data Science & AI, Cloud, Podcast, Business Intelligence, Development 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 or big data into the cloud and we had some nice insights that we want to share. We asked our two guests of this episode to do…

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

By Peter Brouwers on 31-07-2019
Category: Architecture, Cloud, Podcast, Interaction Design, Interaction Design, Development 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…

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

By Peter Brouwers on 24-07-2019
Category: Architecture, Culture, Podcast, Development 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…

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Audiobooks – How to introduce the Netflix for reading?

By Peter Brouwers on 17-07-2019
Category: Culture, Podcast, UX, Development, Testing Tags: Development Android development Podcast Ios Development launch audiobooks

As podcast makers, we are very happy that we can talk about a subject that is very close to ours. In this episode, we talk about one of the recent product launches. The launch of audiobooks. Besides the already existing “all you can read subscription” we developed an Audiobook subscription together with Rakuten Kobo. In the world that is dominated by pictures and movies the book itself and reading are under pressure. But we also see that the audience for listening on demand is growing if you look at the…

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Software Parade; the fun way to create an overview of hundreds of applications in Neo4J

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 10-07-2019
Category: Architecture, Podcast, Development Tags: Architecture Microservices YBIYRIYLI Podcast software parade Neo4j graph database

One of the challenges in a (micro-)service landscape is to keep track of all capabilities in the services. Another is to keep track of the consumers of your service and the consumers beyond. Taking our IT landscape as an example: we work with over 120 teams on over 850 different applications varying from services, GUI’s, services, data builders and other types of applications. In an environment like ours, it’s crucial to understand what applications we have, what functionality they offer and who are working on them. In the past, the…

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Scary close to fully autonomous teams at Onefootball

By Peter Brouwers on 3-07-2019
Category: Diversity, Culture, Podcast, Development Tags: Agile Spaces Summit Podcast way of working Product teams

This is a special episode of the bol.com Techlab Podcast. It’s recorded on at our own Tech Conference the bol.com spaces summit. Directly after Jim gave his presentation about ‘scary close to fully autonomous teams at Onefootball’ we interviewed him. We had a great presentation at Spaces Summit with the Title: “scary close to fully autonomous teams”. Within bol.com we strive for autonomous teams because we believe that we will go faster, are more agile and we have more fun. But it is also great to hear from people outside…

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Spaces Summit 2019 – Part II

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 27-06-2019
Category: Podcast, Development, Testing Tags: Java Event kubernetes Spaces Summit Podcast Tech Community

Three years ago, a group of enthusiastic engineers gathered together during the Friday drinks. They wanted to interact more in the growing organization. Learn more from each other by sharing cool stories. The plan for a bol.com tech summit was born, they called it Spaces Summit.   Three years later the 3rd edition in succession is organized by a dedicated team of committed engineers. It’s the 13th of June and the Techlab Podcast team is on the Spaces Summit 2019 location to give you an impression of the Spaces Summit.   In the previous episode of the podcast we interviewed one…

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Spaces Summit 2019 – Part I

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 20-06-2019
Category: Podcast, Development Tags: Java Event Software Community teams Spaces Summit Podcast

Three years ago a group of enthusiastic engineers gathered together during the Friday drinks. They wanted to interact more in the growing organization. Learn more from each other by sharing cool stories. The plan for a bol.com tech summit was born, they called it Spaces Summit.   Three years later the 3rd edition in succession is organized by a dedicated team of committed engineers. It’s the 13th of June and the Techlab Podcast team is on the Spaces Summit location to give you an impression of the Spaces Summit.   We interviewed one of the committee members to tell you the What, Why…

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Cultural Diversity – It all starts with yourself

By Peter Brouwers on 12-06-2019
Category: Diversity, Culture, Podcast

In this episode, we touch upon a cultural aspect of Tech within bol.com, Cultural Diversity. Over the last couple of years, our international community especially in IT in bol.com grew from 5 in 2014 to 120 in 2019 out of a total of 450 people in Tech. As a former Dutch company, you can imagine that this brings a lot of potential and it also has its challenges. In the week of the 21st of May, the World Day of Cultural Diversity, bol.com celebrated this with Cultural Diversity Week. For…

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Spaces Summit – Launching for the 3rd edition

By Niels Kuiper on 7-06-2019
Category: Culture, Development, Events Tags: Event Development software engineering Spaces Summit

On June 13th, we organize the third edition of Spaces Summit: an internal tech conference for and by bol.com IT. From the start of the idea three years ago at a “borrel” (Friday afternoon drinks), Spaces Summit has become the biggest event inside bol.com IT to get inspired, learn, share knowledge, show off and get together as a community . This third edition will again be bigger than last year: a total of 500 attendees (150 more than last year!), an unusual afternoon keynote, inspiring talks on a variety of subjects, good…

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Axle the opinionated support for bol.com scrum teams

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 6-06-2019
Category: Architecture, Podcast, Development Tags: Java Podcast Axle Spring Boot

In this episode, we talk about Axle. Axle is our internal framework for building Java-based applications. Well actually as you will learn in this episode it is not a framework. It is an opinionated approach to building Java applications like Spring Boot is an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with a minimum of hassle. Since internally we use the same thing for cross-cutting concerns like logging and metrics these all come out of the box when using Axle. Besides that, it…

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Meetup: Angular and Progressive Web Apps

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 5-06-2019
Category: Development, Events Tags: Meetup Event Development Angular PWA

On Wednesday the 26th of June bol.com will host a meetup about Angular and Progressive Web Apps (PWA). Lars Meijdam en Marcel Visser (both Team Rockstars IT) will present on Progressive Web Apps. What are these PWA’s? What sets them apart from native apps? How to create them? Stefan Nieuwhuis will dive into taming huge enterprise applications with Mono repos, Design Systems & Web Components. Program 17.30 -18.30 Welcome, food and drinks 18.30 – 19.15 Progressive Web Apps – Lars Meijdam en Marcel Visser – Rockstars IT 19.15 – 19.45…

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Performance boost the pick algorithm in the warehouse

By Peter Brouwers on 29-05-2019
Category: Data Science & AI, Cloud, Podcast, Infrastructure, Development, Testing Tags: cloud Algorithms Warehouse scaling performance flexibility

In this episode we dive into the world were e-commerce becomes physical. We talk about the bol.com Fulfilment Center (BFC). Within these centres, we have several challenges and one of these challenges has to do with the picking algorithm. The pick algorithm determines the route in a warehouse that is performed to pick all the products for a set of customers. As bol.com we have very high volumes of products that we must send from our warehouses to customers every day. So, it makes sense to optimize the distance that…

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Improve the customer journey with Intent Recognition and Conversational Analytics

By Peter Brouwers on 23-05-2019
Category: Data Science & AI, Podcast, Development Tags: DataScience Machine Learning Natural language processing Customer Support Predictive Models Comprehender

In this episode, we talk with Daniel and Emiel, software engineer and product owner in the customer support domain. In this domain, the focus is to help our customers in the best way possible. But what if we can prevent the customer to feel the need to contact bol.com in the first place, they asked themselves. They realized this can be possible using the analyses of the various customer interactions we have via the Chatbot “Billie”, live chat, phone and email. For these analyses, they introduced techniques from the Data…

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Meetup: René Feiner (MessageBird) & Maarten Dirkse (bol.com) – Migrating to the cloud

By Leon van Tegelen on 9-05-2019
Category: Cloud, Development, Events Tags: Meetup Event cloud Migration

On Wednesday the 15th of May bol.com will host a meetup about migrating from on-prem to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). After dinner is served, René Feiner, director of engineering at MessageBird will kick off the evening and talk about how and why they moved from their datacenter to GCP. Then, after a short break, Maarten Dirkse, cloud advocate at bol.com, will discuss bol.com’s ongoing migration to GCP and what lessons they have learned along the way. So if you’re interested in why companies migrate to the cloud and how…

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Introduction to our upcoming bol.com Techlab podcast episodes

By Peter Brouwers on 1-05-2019
Category: Culture, Data Science & AI, Podcast, Development

“Welcome to the bol.com Tech Podcast. In this podcast we share our experience with you to learn and entertain. Peeking behind the screens of IT and Tech in general at bol.com.  Showing you our approach to IT, e-commerce and retail platforms.” This is our opening sentence of the upcoming episodes of the bol.com Tech podcast. In this introduction episode we like to share with you: What is this podcast about, why did we start it and why should you listen to it? We hope that you enjoy the podcasts as…

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Sushi: A DSL for Conversational Flow Design

By Amin Dorostanian on 10-01-2019
Category: Blog, Development Tags: Kotlin flow design DSL FSM Conversational AI bot

TL;DR: We share our experience on how we built a conversational bot with Finite State Machines. It turned out to have its own shortcomings so we built a DSL to design our flows and called it “Sushi”.
Sushi is a more flexible and straight-forward tool to build complicated flows.

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How we deal with the unexpected

By Peter Brouwers on 8-01-2019
Category: Blog, Culture, Infrastructure Tags: IT Outage Post-Mortem Retro On Call Peak Season

“It didn’t look like a big issue at that moment”. Everybody in the room listened to what the Engineer on Duty (EoD) had to tell about the first moments what, later on, turned out to be a partly outage of the webshop in peak season.

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The life of a WMS consultant at bol.com

By Jeroen Ligthart on 7-01-2019
Category: Blog, Culture Tags: IT Logistics WMS Warehouse

Bol.com is growing with approximately 30% per year, not just in terms of revenues but also operationally. With these increasing numbers it’s an on-going challenge to fulfil all customer orders in time. Year in year out we’re pushing both logistical operations and IT to their limits; two elements that come together in the role of a WMS (Warehouse Management System) Consultant. it’s our job to design and build scalable solutions in the WMS to improve stability and operational efficiency.

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A developer friendly GraphQL client

By Jasper van Heijst on 21-12-2018
Category: Blog, Development Tags: Java software engineering GraphQL

At bol.com we use GraphQL in our IT landscape, and we’ve found a convenient way of working with these API’s we would like to share. By generating our GraphQL queries from Java objects by using annotations, developers don’t need to worry about the query, and don’t need to maintain both a query and a domain object anymore.

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Stop Smashing your Keyboard! Zoom out! Think!

By Eduardo da Silva on 14-12-2018
Category: Architecture, Culture, Development, Events Tags: Architecture Development Culture Design

TL;DR: this article discusses in detail my presentation at Spaces Summit 2018. I talked about the need to stop smashing our keyboards and “blindly” focus on “high-speed”, and start thinking about what we are doing, why and how we are doing it.

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Finding the longest matching string prefix … fast

By ir. drs. Niels Basjes on 10-12-2018
Category: Data Science & AI, Development Tags: Java Software Open source DataScience Algorithms

In many systems at bol.com the response speed of our systems is very important. This blog is about the data structures and algorithms we used to make a specific analysis step a lot faster: Finding the longest matching string prefix.

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Using Elasticsearch as the Primary Data Store

By Volkan Yazici on 3-12-2018
Category: Development Tags: Java elasticsearch search etl

The biggest e-commerce company in the Netherlands and Belgium, bol.com, set out on a 4 year journey to rethink and rebuild their entire ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipeline, that has been cooking up the data used by its search engine since the dawn of time.

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Part 3: Talks Spaces Summit v2.0

By Sjors van Berkel on 25-09-2018
Category: Blog, Culture, Development Tags: Java Kotlin conference Organizing JVM

Last June, Spaces Summit was organized by and for bol.com employees. At Techlab, we want to celebrate this event by highlighting two presentations every month. This month, let’s get meta, and talk about organizing a conference. After that, we’ll go full geek again and look at Kotlin, to cure the Java headache you probably didn’t realize you were having in the first place.

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Life of an IT Intern at bol.com

By Laura and Paul on 11-09-2018
Category: Blog, Culture, Development Tags: Development internship IT automated testing Axon Spaces Summit

At bol.com, we deal with a lot of complex, technical challenges. Luckily, we also attract a lot of people who like a good challenge. This blog features two of our valuable interns, who chose to do a project with bol.com to benefit both us, and their studies. Read about their experiences, and the fun they had while doing their awesome work.

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Part 2: Talks Spaces Summit v2.0

By Sjors van Berkel on 15-08-2018
Category: Blog, Development Tags: Testing Spock Karate Cucumber API

Last June, Spaces Summit was organized by and for bol.com employees. At Techlab, we want to celebrate this event by highlighting two presentations every month. This month, we will look at two exciting presentations about aptly-named testing frameworks: Spock, and Karate.

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How (not) to sink a data stream to files? Journeys from Kafka to Parquet.

By Gabor Hermann on 30-07-2018
Category: Development Tags: Java Scalability BigData Open source distributed

Last year the Measuring 2.0 team at bol.com has started measuring user behavior on the bol.com website. Of course, we wanted to make the data widely accessible within the whole organization.

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Test automation with a great new tool: Cypress

By Pim Rebholz on 10-07-2018
Category: Development, Testing Tags: Testing Cypress JavaScript Test automation

Early October 2017 saw the release of a new tool for test automation, Cypress 1.0. It’s not just another tool, it’s a tool with specific goals in mind.

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Part 1: Talks Spaces Summit v2.0

By Sjors van Berkel on 8-07-2018
Category: Blog, Architecture, Culture, Cloud, Development Tags: Event cloud

Last June, Spaces Summit was organized by and for bol.com employees. At Techlab, we want to celebrate this event by highlighting two presentations every month. This month, we will look at the challenges of moving our server infrastructure to the cloud, and, also important, how to use the cloud for pouring cold beer. Talk #1: Going to the cloud: Forget EVERYTHING you know! Speaker: Maarten Dirkse Genre: Way of working Slides Abstract: bol.com is moving to the cloud. When you’re doing so, what should you care about? Can you handle the…

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SWAPs: From monolith to small web applications

By Elinor Bakker on 19-06-2018
Category: Architecture, UX, Development Tags: Architecture Microservices Scalability UX Partners bol.com devops YBIYRIYLI

Web applications usually start small and loveable, but gradually become larger and larger as more people work on them and front-end technologies move on. If you’re not careful they can potentially end up as the one thing no-one wants to touch anymore and cause a lot of frustrations for agile teams and business innovators alike.

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Spaces Summit v2.0 – “That t-shirt is not black, it is very dark blue”

By AKrichevskiy on 14-06-2018
Category: Blog, Culture, Events Tags: Development conference Summit IT

Yes, we made it again!  Spaces summit 2018 – the bol.com IT conference by engineers, for engineers – happened again last 7th of June, on the hot summer day in our home town Utrecht.

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Software Testing at bol.com

By Ajeesh on 25-05-2018
Category: Blog, Development, Testing Tags: Testing Agile devops Docker

Testing has been in an accelerated evolution over the last decade. Due to the fact that different practices — like Continuous Integration and Delivery, DevOps, and Agile — have shifted and refined at a rapid pace.

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In search for perfect coding interview assignment

By AKrichevskiy on 8-05-2018
Category: Blog, Culture, Development Tags: skills coding assignment test

At bol.com, IT grows together with the rest of the organization. We are constantly searching for brilliant new colleagues. We believe that we are as good as our next hire, and our next hire depends on our interview process.

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Organizing your own tech conference: how cool is that?!

By Frederieke Ubels on 8-05-2018
Category: Blog, Culture, Development, Events Tags: Young Professional Event Community conference Engineering Culture

Well, pretty cool, I’d say. And even cooler if you are a young professional, fresh out of university and just started in your first job. But our pay-off is “Je kan het met bol.com” and that’s exactly how it is!

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Quality through autonomous teams

By Frederieke Ubels on 18-04-2018
Category: Blog, Development Tags: Resilience Agile devops YBIYRIYLI Autonomy Quality

In the heart of the Agile method are autonomous teams that take responsibility and make their own decisions. Transitioning to self-organizing teams may seem like a risk, a move intuitively perilous to quality. But Rini van Solingen explains how bol.com and ANWB used autonomous teams to greatly improve the quality of their systems.

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IT internship at bol.com

By Boyd Hogerheijde on 5-04-2018
Category: Blog, Culture, Development Tags: Young Professional software engineering internship

Boyd was an intern at bol.com from September 2017 until January 2018. This blog is a conversation between him and his intern mentor, Maurice Zeijen (Software Architect @ bol.com), about his experiences as an intern. 

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Making Machines Understand You

By Daniël Heres on 7-03-2018
Category: Blog, Data Science & AI Tags: Machine Learning Natural language processing Chatbots Deep Learning Artificial Intelligence

In this post, I will explain how bol.com is going to interpret what the user says using Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing.

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Your leaky online payment process

By Denise Visser on 5-03-2018
Category: Blog, Architecture Tags: Payment optimization process

According to figures from Ingenico, around 15% of site visitors in the Netherlands that begin the payment process do not complete their transaction. This can have many causes which will be examined later in this article.

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Getting organized: cleaning up bol.com with Data Science

By Ernst Kuiper on 20-02-2018
Category: Blog, Data Science & AI Tags: BigData DataScience Machine Learning

Data Science and Machine Learning are becoming more integrated into current businesses. Especially in e-commerce there is huge potential for predictive modeling. It is therefore no surprise that bol.com has given extra focus on significantly expanding its Data Science efforts the coming year. That’s not to say that there aren’t already some interesting Data Science projects running. In this blog post we will take a look at one of the projects I am currently working on with fellow data scientist Joep Janssen: the chunk project.

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A new idea: to improve teams we don’t need to improve teams…

By Menno Vis on 16-01-2018
Category: Blog, Culture, Development Tags: teams continuous improvement idea

One of the things that keeps us busy at bol.com is the continuous quest to figure out what else we could do to make our teams better. Even better I should write, since the vast majority of our teams are doing great already and I am very proud at them!

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Video: How does IT work?

By Menno Vis on 16-12-2017
Category: Culture, Development Tags: Agile Scrum Culture Autonomy Video

Over 1200 people work at bol.com and our IT department consists of more than 350 engineers, clustered into 60 cross-functional teams. These teams are all grouped in fleets and spaces. Staying organized at this scale is definitely a challenge. To make this happen, we optimize for autonomy, mastery, purpose and ownership

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Video: Insights- Building a Boomerang that doesn’t come back (to haunt you) at Spaces Summit

By Mattijs Meiboom on 15-12-2017
Category: Blog, Architecture, Culture, Development Tags: Testing Architecture Microservices Concepts Change Risks

“My past year as a software engineer at bol.com has mostly been dedicated to breaking down one of the big monoliths within our software landscape into smaller services. To be more specific: I’ve been working in a team to extract the processes related to customer returns into a separate microservice.”

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Developers in Control

By Patrick van Dissel on 1-12-2017
Category: Blog, Culture, Infrastructure, Development, Testing Tags: Testing Development Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery continuous improvement Jenkins Gitlab Spinnaker Build Automation

Bol.com has a build automation tools team since 2012, going from installation manuals, to hundreds of manually maintained Jenkins jobs, to 5000+ generated Jenkins jobs, to fully autonomous teams. What did we do, what are we doing, where are we going, and how are we getting there.

In this demo rich talk, We’ll show you the ins- and outs, our challenges, and our approaches to keeping our growing development community happy and productive.

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Movie: Insights- the definitive talk at Spaces Summit

By William Leese on 23-11-2017
Category: Blog, Infrastructure, Development, Events Tags: data production monitoring

Creating great software just doesn’t cut it anymore. Nowadays you as the developer are also responsible for running it.When things go wrong, you’re the one pouring through all the data to find out what happened.

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We won the award for Best Tutorial at the EuroSTAR 2017 conference

By Menno Vis on 16-11-2017
Category: Blog, Development, Testing Tags: Testing

This year at the EuroSTAR Conference Joost and Ivo were invited to give their tutorial ‘Docker for Testers’. Docker has been instrumental in speeding up the development process at bol.com. We use it to create isolated test environments, to speed up feedback cycles and to allow teams to work more autonomously.

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DevOps is not a goal – releasing often is

By Frederieke Ubels on 9-11-2017
Category: Blog, Culture, Infrastructure, Development Tags: devops Development release

Due to the influence of agile working and the increasing dynamics of the market, releasing is becoming a bottleneck. The question is: how can we fundamentally accelerate the release process? Rini van solingen explains which measures work in practice and illustrates this based on interviews at bol.com.

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Berlin Buzzwords: Measuring 2.0 in production

By Ivan Budincevic on 6-11-2017
Category: Blog, Infrastructure, Development Tags: Infrastructure Web Analytics Apache Flink Kafka Avro Parguet

At the Berlin Buzzwords 2017 conference I had the chance to talk about our new measuring infrastructure at bol.com.

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Our agile journey so far – Part 5: Sustaining the change

By Menno Vis on 1-11-2017
Category: Blog, Culture, Development Tags: Agile Scrum devops Culture leadership

This is the fifth and last post about our growth story. You’ve read about the history of bol.com and the process they made to reach their goal: landing on the moon. Now we’ve come to the final chapter.

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Abuser Stories: thinking like a hacker

By Jim van der Waal on 18-10-2017
Category: Blog, Culture, Development Tags: Security user stories requirements happy flows hacker analysis

Thinking of requirements that limit your cool idea doesn’t sound like a lot of fun right? But actually it is.

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Hackathon delivers again

By Maarten Dirkse on 18-10-2017
Category: Blog, Diversity, Culture, Development, Events Tags: hackathon Development software engineering frontend kubernetes selenium

The 9th edition of the bol.com internal hackathon was held on Friday, October 6th, and participants were able to present their projects to the colleagues last Thursday.

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Bol.com goes to the university of Amsterdam!

By Mary Gouseti on 12-10-2017
Category: Development, Events Tags: Software Agile Scrum Development University Amsterdam

For the last 4 years, Menno represents bol.com as a guest lecturer in one of the courses of the Software Engineering Master’s program at University of Amsterdam, this year it’s about Requirements engineering.

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Video: ServiceWorkers SwissKnife at Spaces Summit

By ahuguetvives on 28-09-2017
Category: Blog, Development Tags: Software Development database Front-End

A couple of months ago we organized our first internal tech conference, Spaces Summit. In the upcoming months we will post some of the talks including the video of the talk.

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Software Engineering Meetup – Security

By Patrick van Dissel on 26-09-2017
Category: Security, Events Tags: Meetup Event Software Security Hackers

On Thursday the 12th of October, the meetup of Software Engineering about security will be hosted by bol.com together with Zerocopter and Flock.

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Software Circus Interview – The move to the public cloud

By Maarten Dirkse on 13-09-2017
Category: Architecture, Culture, Cloud, Development Tags: Event Architecture Software Cloudbusting cloud

IT infrastructure transitions can be hard. Obviously there are technical challenges to overcome. But what do you do when internal disagreement about the way forward leads to a halt in innovation?

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Feature Toggle, one step closer to continuous integration and continuous delivery

By Ajeesh on 5-09-2017
Category: Development, Testing Tags: Testing Feature Toggle Continuous Integration Continuous Delivery

Back in the day, my team couldn’t deploy a new software version to production immediately. We had to wait because testing hadn’t finished. Or because a big feature wasn’t production-ready. Or because our acceptance tester didn’t have time to check the new version.

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Software Circus 2017

By Maarten Dirkse on 5-09-2017
Category: Culture, Events Tags: Event circus Cloudbusting

The conference with a kick is back! And they have been busy.. This time Software Circus will come back as a true FestiCon. Here they will challenge the status quo and bust this cloud open to really see what is in, out and around. And bol.com will be a part of this FestiCon Circus.

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Video: My resilience GoTo presentation

By Maurice Zeijen on 1-09-2017
Category: Blog, Architecture, Development Tags: Event Microservices Hystrix Video

During the GoTo Amsterdam conference this year, I did a talk on “Resilience Engineering in a Microservice Landscape”.

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Our agile journey so far – Part 4: Servant leaders

By Menno Vis on 23-08-2017
Category: Blog, Culture, Development Tags: Agile Scrum devops leadership

This is the fourth post about our growth story. In the previous blog post we explained how bol.com realized an organizational change with YBIYRIYLI (You build it, you run it, you love it). Now it’s time to take a closer look at the more personal part. How can a company make sure employees stay happy and motivated? What does it take to be a leader in a company with autonomous teams? And how did bol.com take on this challenge?

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Software Engineering Meetup – Microservices

By Willem Veelenturf on 11-08-2017
Category: Development, Events Tags: Meetup Event Microservices

On Thursday the 7th of September Meetup of Software Engineering will be hosted by bol.com together with Flock. 

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The Dutch Software Testing Championship

By Lucas Verberne on 24-07-2017
Category: Testing Tags: Testing Community Culture

After the success of Software Testing World Cup last year, the winning team thought a Dutch version would also be interesting. Co-organized and hosted by Dutch Software Testing Association TestNet, the championship took place on May 1st.

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Services & Autonomy: the one can’t live without the other

By Frederieke Ubels 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.

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Japanese cucumbers, boomerangs and utopias

By 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?

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How CQRS got our web scale groove back

By 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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From database killer to top performer!

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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DevOps Utrecht June meetup @ bol.com

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.

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Bol.com @ Agile Amsterdam 2017

By 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).

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From a crazy hackathon idea to an empty queue

By 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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Hands-on test tooling workshops by bol.com & VX Company

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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Our agile journey so far – Part 3: You build it, you run it, you love it

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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bol.com Techlab with Michael Bolton

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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Image recognition. Deep learning. And cake.

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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Rapid Software Testing: A walk on the wild side

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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Making sense of the user agent string

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.

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Ladies that UX Utrecht take over bol.com

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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Our agile journey so far – Part 2: involving everyone

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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Big, bigger, scalable

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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Video: James Bach on the future of the testing role

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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Let our bol.com partners shine

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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Bol.com launches beta environment

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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Testing bol.com style

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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For better device profiling, delete your DDR!

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.

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Our agile journey so far – Part 1: bol.com to the moon!

By 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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How structure helps me to maintain software

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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My baby was leaky and now it’s not

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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Life as an expat at bol.com

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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