Coroutines are a wonderful way of writing asynchronous, non-blocking code in Kotlin. Think of them as lightweight threads, because that’s exactly what they are. Lightweight threads aim to reduce context switching, a relatively expensive operation. Moreover, you can easily suspend and cancel them anytime. Sounds great, right?
Coroutine Gotchas - Bridging the Gap between Coroutine and Non-Coroutine WorldsIntroduction Like living organisms, companies need to learn and adapt to an ever-changing ecosystem. As a result of that, we are witnessing a paradigm shift in which domain experts are originating important innovations. They are product managers, engineers, analysts,...
Empowering autonomous experimentation in a scaling enterpriseYou are a UX researcher, and you are a UX researcher… Everybody is a UX researcher! That’s kind of our approach to user centered design at bol. com. Does it make the whole process more customer minded? Definitely.
Everybody is a UX ResearcherAt 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 itThis 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).
Our agile journey so far – Part 4: Servant leaders