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

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

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

    Spaces Talk #2: Introduction to Sociotechnical Architecture

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

    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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    Spaces Talk #2: Introduction to Sociotechnical Architecture

    Video: My Chaos Engineering presentation

     Luc Kleeven, on 9-07-2020
    Category: Blog, Development Tags:

    During the spaces summit this year, I did a talk on “Chaos Engineering: Why we should embrace chaos”. About me I’ve been working as a software developer since 2008 and have been at bol.com since 2016. I’m passionate about code quality: clean code, testing, reliability, etc. I recently learned about chaos engineering and I think it might be the next new tool in our developer toolkit to improve our code quality even further! About the talk Chaos engineering is the practice of doing experiments on your system to gain insights…

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    Video: My Chaos Engineering presentation

    Our ride to peak season frontend performance

     Edwin van der Graaf, on 25-02-2020
    Category: Development Tags:

    We can imagine that at a regular company your colleagues might become very nervous when you worsen the frontend performance by more than a second on the onload, just before the peak season. In this story we’d like to share our journey from experiencing a setback in performance that was caused by us innovating, to the point where we became the retailer with the second fastest frontend response times (Twinkle and Computest benchmark study) in the Netherlands. Before diving into the details, it’s worth mentioning that we as software engineers…

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    Our ride to peak season frontend performance

    Integration testing Pub/Sub interactions in your application

     Mark Krijgsman, on 18-02-2020
    Category: Development Tags:

    As part of the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Google provides Pub/Sub as its queuing mechanism. After creating a Pub/Sub topic in GCP, you can create publishers to send messages to a topic and subscribers to receive messages from a topic. In order to send or receive Pub/Sub messages from GCP, you can choose to authenticate with GCP through user account or service account credentials. This has one disadvantage; when running your build either locally or on a build server such as Gitlab, your application will attempt to communicate with GCP for its Pub/Sub interactions. Your build will either…

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    Integration testing Pub/Sub interactions in your application

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

    Refactoring your code

     Jasper van Heijst, on 17-09-2019
    Category: Blog, Architecture, Development Tags:

    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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    Refactoring your code

    Spaces Summit – Launching for the 3rd edition

     Niels Kuiper, on 7-06-2019
    Category: Culture, Development, Events Tags:

    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…

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    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:

    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…

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    Meetup: Angular and Progressive Web Apps

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

     Leon van Tegelen, on 9-05-2019
    Category: Cloud, Development, Events Tags:

    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…

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