Spaces Summit goes virtual – Organising our internal tech conference

Spaces Summit in corona time means Spaces Summit goes virtual. Maybe you remember from last year that we have an annual internal tech conference at bol.com. Given the measures, in place, we can’t come together. So, we go for a digital online equivalent. We wanted to know what it takes to organise an event like this? But we found out there’s an even more important step before. It’s getting the answer to the question “what are we going to do?” Many people and organisations who are organizing conferences, meetups, summits…

Spaces Summit goes virtual – Organising our internal tech conference

Spaces Summit – Launching for the 3rd edition

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…

Spaces Summit – Launching for the 3rd edition

How we deal with the unexpected

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.

The life of a WMS consultant at bol.com

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.

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.

Part 3: Talks Spaces Summit v2.0

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.

Life of an IT Intern at bol.com

Laura & 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.

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…

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

Andrey Krichevskiy, 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.

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

In search for perfect coding interview assignment

Andrey Krichevskiy, 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.

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

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!

IT internship at bol.com

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.

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

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!

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

Video: How does IT work?

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

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.”

Developers in Control

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.

DevOps is not a goal – releasing often is

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.

DevOps is not a goal – releasing often is

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

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.

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

Abuser Stories: thinking like a hacker

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.

Hackathon delivers again

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.

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?

Software Circus 2017

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.

Our agile journey so far – Part 4: Servant leaders

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?

Our agile journey so far – Part 4: Servant leaders

Japanese cucumbers, boomerangs and utopias

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?

From database killer to top performer!

Nick Tinnemeier, 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.

Bol.com @ Agile Amsterdam 2017

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).

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

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.

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

Our agile journey so far – Part 2: involving everyone

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.

Our agile journey so far – Part 2: involving everyone

Let our bol.com partners shine

Thatiana, 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.

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

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.

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