Architecture – 14 articles

Spaces Talk #4: From prototype to production. A real-life cloud story.

Quiran Storey, on 24-08-2020
Category: Architecture, Cloud, Infrastructure, Development Tags: Event Spaces Summit

This year the bol.com Spaces Summit was held virtually and Anastasija and myself, Quiran Storey, presented a talk on a topic that is close to our daily work “From prototype to production. A real-life cloud story.” About the talk All things start out as ideas, or prototypes, and our R2D2 is no different. In this talk we will give you a glimpse of how bol.com’s self-service cloud provisioning tool came to be. But also how it is constantly evolving from a proof of concept to a full-on production system. We…

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Spaces Talk #2: Introduction to Sociotechnical Architecture

Eduardo da Silva, on 27-07-2020
Category: Architecture, Development Tags: Spaces Summit

I’ve had the great pleasure of giving a talk at the Spaces Summit 2020, the internal bol.com Tech conference. About the talk Maximizing the impact of our products is more than just thinking about their technical architecture. Doing so would lead to just partially optimizing their potential impact. Instead, we need to follow an approach that also recognizes people (i.e. the teams building the products) as a central element in the design space. This way of co-designing is termed “Sociotechnical Architecture”. In my talk on this topic, I first lay…

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Introducing Stanley: bol.com highway to (heaven) BigQuery

Deepank Gupta, Sourygna Luangsay, on 19-11-2019
Category: Architecture, Cloud, Business Intelligence, Development

Yes, it’s confirmed! Bol.com is going to the Cloud! The contract with Google has been recently signed, which gives us about 1 year to migrate from Platfora (our BI visualization tool), before it stops having support.   1 year thus to migrate many datasets and dashboards to the Cloud. The tools in Google Cloud are great, and our colleagues are too; so, what could possibly go wrong?… At least this is what we thought in 2017… Our Big Data situation in 2017 Bol.com was storing its Big Data on Hadoop…

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Refactoring your code

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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Stop Smashing your Keyboard! Zoom out! Think!

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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Part 1: Talks Spaces Summit v2.0

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

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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Your leaky online payment process

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

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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Software Circus Interview – The move to the public cloud

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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