Podcast Archives - bol.com Techlab

Load testing with Locust – Podcast

During the recording of this episode, we are in the week of Black Friday. An exciting week for people hunting for bargains. And also for a lot of our colleagues. Whether that is from a commercial point of view or an engineering one. All the eyeballs on our website, bring a lot of traffic. And consequential a lot of load on our systems. In this episode, we focus on one aspect of preparing for a large load: Load Testing. In this episode, we are going to talk about Load Testing…

How could this happen – podcast

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 19-11-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Web scale Scalability Resilience devops Engineering Culture Peak Season Learn incident

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. And you might have noticed that enabling our software engineers to perform at their peak is very important for us. Enabling teams and engineers is what we do to build a great place to engineer. And sometimes things just go sour. A perfect…

AI for Retail Lab on recommendations – podcast

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 3-11-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: DataScience Innovation recommendations AI ML Retail AIRLab

In this episode, we virtually visit the AI for Retail Lab and dive with two members into the world of recommendations. The AI for Retail (AIR) Lab Amsterdam is a joint UvA-Ahold Delhaize industry lab and conducts research into socially responsible algorithms aimed at the retail domain. Think of developing models for recommendations and managing goods flows. The research, testing and application of the models take place in Albert Hein Delhaize and bol.com. What the episode covers What is the AIRLab (Artificial Intelligence Research Lab) and what is it trying…

AI for Retail Lab on recommendations – podcast

Warehouse Mechanization – podcast

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 28-10-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Logistics Warehouse warehouse mechanization integration

Warehouse mechanization is a part of our IT landscape where our IT meets the physical world. It is one of those places where we encounter that while we could scale our IT almost indefinitely in the cloud, the physical world and warehouses don’t work that way. As you listen to this episode you will learn how the world of IT has to adapt to the physical world to make things work. And as Peter states this is also the place where e-commerce comes to life. This is the place where…

The Programmer’s Brain – podcast

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 7-10-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: skills software engineering clean code Books

Some aspects of software engineering are easily overlooked. In the book The Programmer’s Brain some of these like reading code, thinking about code and collaborating on code are at the centre. In this episode, we talk to the author of this book to guide us through these aspects. To improve your coding skills it is good to know how your brain works. That will enable you to set your brain to work for you. If you spent significantly more time on reading code than on writing code, shouldn’t we focus…

Understanding customers using their search queries – Podcast

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 30-09-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: scale search customer intent

Imagine you want to buy something. You go to bol.com and you start typing the article in the search bar. Automatically you will be served suggestions and as a result, you want a limited number of articles from our 30 million products catalogue. You select the product you want, press the buy button and there it is, at your doorstep at the selected moment. Sounds simple, right? Inspired by a talk of our guest of this episode earlier this year, we wanted to find out what’s behind the search bar.…

Understanding customers using their search queries – Podcast

How the Retailer API became the heart and soul of an ecosystem – podcast

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 31-08-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Partners bol.com Development API

In early April the latest version of our Retailer API was launched. Given the importance of the API for almost 15.000 partners this was again a major step. Over the years the retailer API became the heart and soul of our ecosystem. But this path wasn’t always that obvious. It took vision, decisiveness and perseverance to get this far. In this episode, we explore this journey. The importance of the Retailer API API’s are considered a major part of a serious platform. They enable growth and stability. The 80/20 rule…

How the Retailer API became the heart and soul of an ecosystem – podcast

Engineering Productivity and Backstage – Podcast

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 23-08-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Open source Innovation skills software engineering Engineering Culture Engineering Productivity Backstage

Engineering Productivity With the growth of our engineering community, the need for more focus on engineering productivity is clear. We invited two experts to discuss this topic with us. We actually got to this point when one of our listeners pointed out one of the products we are using for this and how awesome a topic that would be for our podcast. Backstage The product he was referring to, is Backstage. Backstage is a platform for developer portals that is used as an app store for tools for software engineers.…

Engineering Productivity and Backstage – Podcast

Outside perspective on the edges of autonomy – Podcast

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 23-07-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Culture Autonomy Reflection

How interaction resulted in a guest appearance “We like interactions and feedback”, that’s what we say in our outro. The guest of our show reacted to one of our podcasts earlier this year. We reached out to him and invited him to the podcast. Why? Because it’s good to look in the mirror. Check our stories with the outside in view. And that’s exactly what we are going to do in this show. Getting the outside perspective on the edges of autonomy. Discussed Items on the edges of autonomy Why…

Outside perspective on the edges of autonomy – Podcast

Predict the Unpredictable – Podcast

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 15-07-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: DataScience Innovation Experimentation forecasting

How Data Science supports us to predict the unpredictable Just like for any store, forecasting is an important tool to support the business and its profitability. At bol.com we have worked on several major iterations of our forecast. One of the hosts worked on a large leap in forecast performance over 8 years ago. You can check some another leap we have made while listening to our podcast episode from May 2019 – nom more crystal ball for forecasting, Data Science it is. In this episode, we explore how we…