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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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 Circus Interview – The move to the public cloud

By Maarten Dirkse on 13-09-2017
Category: Architecture, Culture, 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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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