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…

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…

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…

Formule X – Accelerate your organisation

‘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…

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…

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

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.