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…

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

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…

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

Meetup: Angular and Progressive Web Apps

Peter Paul van de Beek, on 5-06-2019
Category: Development, Events Tags: Meetup Event Development Angular PWA

On Wednesday the 26th of June bol.com will host a meetup about Angular and Progressive Web Apps (PWA). Lars Meijdam en Marcel Visser (both Team Rockstars IT) will present on Progressive Web Apps. What are these PWA’s? What sets them apart from native apps? How to create them? Stefan Nieuwhuis will dive into taming huge enterprise applications with Mono repos, Design Systems & Web Components. Program 17.30 -18.30 Welcome, food and drinks 18.30 – 19.15 Progressive Web Apps – Lars Meijdam en Marcel Visser – Rockstars IT 19.15 – 19.45…

Meetup: René Feiner (MessageBird) & Maarten Dirkse (bol.com) – Migrating to the cloud

Leon van Tegelen, on 9-05-2019
Category: Cloud, Development, Events Tags: Meetup Event cloud Migration

On Wednesday the 15th of May bol.com will host a meetup about migrating from on-prem to the Google Cloud Platform (GCP). After dinner is served, René Feiner, director of engineering at MessageBird will kick off the evening and talk about how and why they moved from their datacenter to GCP. Then, after a short break, Maarten Dirkse, cloud advocate at bol.com, will discuss bol.com’s ongoing migration to GCP and what lessons they have learned along the way. So if you’re interested in why companies migrate to the cloud and how…

Sushi: A DSL for Conversational Flow Design

Amin Dorostanian, on 10-01-2019
Category: Blog, Development Tags: Kotlin flow design DSL FSM Conversational AI bot

TL;DR: We share our experience on how we built a conversational bot with Finite State Machines. It turned out to have its own shortcomings so we built a DSL to design our flows and called it “Sushi”.
Sushi is a more flexible and straight-forward tool to build complicated flows.

A developer friendly GraphQL client

Jasper van Heijst, on 21-12-2018
Category: Blog, Development Tags: Java software engineering GraphQL

At bol.com we use GraphQL in our IT landscape, and we’ve found a convenient way of working with these API’s we would like to share. By generating our GraphQL queries from Java objects by using annotations, developers don’t need to worry about the query, and don’t need to maintain both a query and a domain object anymore.

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.

Finding the longest matching string prefix … fast

Niels Basjes, on 10-12-2018
Category: Data Science & AI, Development Tags: Java Software Open source DataScience Algorithms

In many systems at bol.com the response speed of our systems is very important. This blog is about the data structures and algorithms we used to make a specific analysis step a lot faster: Finding the longest matching string prefix.

Using Elasticsearch as the Primary Data Store

Volkan Yazici, on 3-12-2018
Category: Development Tags: Java elasticsearch search etl

The biggest e-commerce company in the Netherlands and Belgium, bol.com, set out on a 4 year journey to rethink and rebuild their entire ETL (Extract, Transform, Load) pipeline, that has been cooking up the data used by its search engine since the dawn of time.

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 2: Talks Spaces Summit v2.0

Sjors van Berkel, on 15-08-2018
Category: Blog, Development Tags: Testing Spock Karate Cucumber API

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 two exciting presentations about aptly-named testing frameworks: Spock, and Karate.

How (not) to sink a data stream to files? Journeys from Kafka to Parquet.

Gabor Hermann, on 30-07-2018
Category: Development Tags: Java Scalability BigData Open source distributed

Last year the Measuring 2.0 team at bol.com has started measuring user behavior on the bol.com website. Of course, we wanted to make the data widely accessible within the whole organization.

Test automation with a great new tool: Cypress

Pim Rebholz, on 10-07-2018
Category: Development, Testing Tags: Testing Cypress JavaScript Test automation

Early October 2017 saw the release of a new tool for test automation, Cypress 1.0. It’s not just another tool, it’s a tool with specific goals in mind.

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…

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.

Software Testing at bol.com

Ajeesh Sasidharan, on 25-05-2018
Category: Blog, Development, Testing Tags: Testing Agile devops Docker

Testing has been in an accelerated evolution over the last decade. Due to the fact that different practices — like Continuous Integration and Delivery, DevOps, and Agile — have shifted and refined at a rapid pace.

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!

Quality through autonomous teams

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.

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.

Movie: Insights- the definitive talk at Spaces Summit

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.

We won the award for Best Tutorial at the EuroSTAR 2017 conference

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.

We won the award for Best Tutorial at the EuroSTAR 2017 conference

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

Berlin Buzzwords: Measuring 2.0 in production

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.

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.

Bol.com goes to the university of Amsterdam!

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.

Bol.com goes to the university of Amsterdam!

Video: ServiceWorkers SwissKnife at Spaces Summit

Antoni Huguet Vives, 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.

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?

Feature Toggle, one step closer to continuous integration and continuous delivery

Ajeesh Sasidharan, 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.

Feature Toggle, one step closer to continuous integration and continuous delivery

Video: My resilience GoTo presentation

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”.

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

Software Engineering Meetup – Microservices

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.

Services & Autonomy: the one can’t live without the other

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.

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?

How CQRS got our web scale groove back

Peter Paul van de Beek, 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 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.

DevOps Utrecht June meetup @ bol.com

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.

From a crazy hackathon idea to an empty queue

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

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

Image recognition. Deep learning. And cake.

Tuan Luu Dinh, 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.

Image recognition. Deep learning. And cake.

Rapid Software Testing: A walk on the wild side

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).

Rapid Software Testing: A walk on the wild side

Making sense of the user agent string

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.

Ladies that UX Utrecht take over bol.com

Thatiana, 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.

Ladies that UX Utrecht take over bol.com

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

Big, bigger, scalable

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.

Video: James Bach on the future of the testing role

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!

Video: James Bach on the future of the testing role

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.

Bol.com launches beta environment

Daan Giesen, 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).

For better device profiling, delete your DDR!

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.

How structure helps me to maintain software

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…

How structure helps me to maintain software

My baby was leaky and now it’s not

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…