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…

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

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…

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.”

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?

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”.

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.

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.

From a crazy hackathon idea to an empty queue

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.