Blog Overview

151

FrontMania 2023

I recently had the opportunity to attend Frontmania, a front-end conference held in Utrecht. It was an incredible experience filled with insightful talks, interactive workshops, and networking opportunities with fellow front-end enthusiasts. In this blog post, I will share some highlights from the conference and the key takeaways that I gained from the event.

FrontMania 2023

Bye Bye, Boring Retrospectives

In this article we’ll first talk about the fundamentals of retrospectives: why they are important and how to structure a simple but effective version. We’ll address a common problem: no actions and/or actors are defined. Next, we’ll take it one step further, and discuss how to avoid “getting stuck” by regularly changing the format of your retrospectives. To top it off, I offer some more varied formats.

Bye Bye, Boring Retrospectives

GraphQLConf’23

In this blogpost we want to share our experience, the take-aways and the sessions you should watch of the recent GraphQLConf’23 in the San Francisco Bay Area this Sept’23.

GraphQLConf’23

Reducing the Cloud Carbon Footprint of bol.

Cloud computing has become the new standard for companies on which to run their operations. The rapid increase in the use of cloud technology has made it a major contributor to global carbon emissions, surpassing even the aviation industry. We recognize the urgency and responsibility to find innovative ways to optimize cloud computing and reduce its environmental impact.

Reducing the Cloud Carbon Footprint of bol.

Product Catalog Hackathon with Ai Recap

In the beginning of August, data science teams at bol.com came together for a dynamic two-day datathon. Collaborating with different teams from different disciplines, their mission was to re-imagine how we discover similar products. This innovative approach involved combining the insights of text (titles/descriptions) and images. To achieve this, they converted both text and image data into vectors and then find similar products by for example using a Faiss index and other.

Product Catalog Hackathon with Ai Recap

Contributing to change & equality for women in tech

“Working at bol.com allows me the freedom to innovate, inspire, and empower other women to do the same.” We are talking to Noha Shafik, who started her career in Egypt and has recently been promoted as bol.com’s Principle Engineering Manager. Guided by her search for personal values, Noha leads a diverse team at bol.com while staying true to herself, her strengths and her purpose.

Contributing to change & equality for women in tech

Bye Bye Hibernate – Discovering alternatives to Hibernate in Kotlin

At bol.com we host a hackathon day every so many months. Developers get to pitch their hackathon idea, so that other developers can join and help them. Sander was curious about other ORM frameworks available for Kotlin. And so, the idea to look for alternatives of Hibernate in Kotlin as a hackathon project came up.

Bye Bye Hibernate – Discovering alternatives to Hibernate in Kotlin

When is our SRE team successful?

At bol.com we believe Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) is the best way to balance product innovation and reliability. In essence it’s a particular set of standards, tools and practices that govern how you balance Dev and Ops in a DevOps software engineering team. But when should SRE teams be happy?

When is our SRE team successful?