Bol’s journey in shifting left* and shifting right**: our Vision
As 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.
If you are a regular listener to the podcast or an e-commerce watcher, you know “the season” is very important for us. It is a yearly recurring theme in the podcast. You are probably also aware that uptime and responsiveness of our app and website are crucial.
Software engineers on Duty - so you sleep well at night
The why and what of our Software engineers on Duty
Let's be honest about this, nobody likes to be woken up at night to react to an alert whether it's a text- or whatsapp message, (automated) phone call or traditional pager....
Site Reliability Engineering; that's music to my ears!
Site Reliability Engineering, or SRE, is seen by a lot of people as the next logical step in developing DevOps capabilities. SRE takes concepts from software engineering and puts them to use in an operations context. Over the last 3 years, we have been experimenting with SRE approaches and gradually integrating them into our DevOps way of working.
When it comes to developing software we use the adagio: You built it, You run it, You love it. Same should hold for all the -ilities or non-functional requirements. So, one should love their logging.
Covid-19 Trilogy Part II - Season Load and season mindset
Covid-19 rules the world, so it determines the subjects for our podcast. Just like others, we moved from studio recording to home recording. Basically working from home (WFH).
Utrecht JUG - Test Architectures & Hacking into Java web apps
We take a sneak peek into the Utrecht JAVA User Group (JUG) Meetup next week, February 24th. Topics will be: are End-to-End test architectures a Dead End road? And there will be some live hacking: Breaking into your Java web app. This will really give a feel for the importance of security.
With only a few weeks to go to our peak season, we wanted to ensure that the chat app on our webshop was performing up to par. An important part of our customers' questions is answered via this chat app. You can feel the importance of it to be able to handle a load of questions during our peak season.
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...