Time to reflect on season 2 of the bol. com techlab podcast with Peter Paul van de Beek and Peter Brouwers. Thanks for all the support in 2020 and we love to see you back in 2021 as guest and listener, Happy New Year! .
A look back at 2020 podcastsOne 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 of them! However we also believe at bol.
A new idea: to improve teams we don’t need to improve teams…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 KotlinDelve into the potential niche for Rust, examining both the obstacles and prospects within this dynamic landscape.
Insights from a Rust ConferenceAt bol.com we like our teams to be autonomous when it comes to implementing solutions to help our customers. However if people are completely free to do whatever they want to reach a team goal we might end up in the bottom right corner of the picture due to lack of direction. We like to be in the upper right corner where there’s both freedom and alignment. The other parts of the diagram are of course less desirable for our software engineers and data scientists.
Tech vision at bol.comAs a company, bol has 25 years of growth, exciting challenges and changes behind its back. Its IT department is no different. Going from 10 to 170+ teams, from 10 to ~1400 applications, embarking on a DevOps journey in 2015, starting the shift to the Cloud in 2017 and going Product Led in 2022, the IT landscape and organisation changed drastically. And while the way we test, release and run our applications changed along the way, early 2021 we realised we need to step up our game when it comes to quality, testing and observability. We took a serious look at where we are in our journey of shifting left and shifting right and realised that besides a clear vision, we also need to focus on providing building blocks to our teams to realise it.
Bol’s journey in shifting left* and shifting right**: our VisionThe hackathon was a chance to showcase the product-led way of working we introduced to bol last year, while working on a topic that is important to all of us; Sustainability!
Our 4-day sustainabol hackathon“I have a cool idea”, said every bol. commer. “The customer will love this”, they continue.
Abuser Stories: thinking like a hackerThis 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.
Our agile journey so far – Part 2: involving everyoneThis 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.
Our agile journey so far – Part 3: You build it, you run it, you love it