Podcast – 94 articles

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…

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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.…

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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…

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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.…

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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…

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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…

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Why would you build an open source FTP server in Rust? – Podcast

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 10-07-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Web scale Open source skills cloud software engineering Software Development Rust FTP

Why build an open-source FTP server in Rust? Sometimes, I must admit I’m a little dazzled by all the languages, frameworks and stuff our engineers work with. So, when our guest of today explained to me some of the intriguing aspects of the language we will be discussing in this episode I had to stretch my mind a little. I managed and could follow his explanation. And I found a great topic for this podcast. In the episode, we explore the Rust programming language and our first open-source code in…

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The Podcast Guest – Podcast

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 1-07-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: skills teams Engineering Culture Tech Community

Who is the Podcast Guest? This will be a bonus episode. Maybe not that tech-related but instead you will listen to a very energetic, passionate and inspiring person: The Podcast Guest. Who knows a lot about asking the right questions and working in teams. And following one of the topics of our last episode, a lot of curiosity is involved. We invited the Podcast Guest (de podcastgast), or actually, he invited himself… His goal is to join 100 different podcasts in 2021. And he is very enthusiastic about his goal.…

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Curiosity is the common denominator for our Business Analysts – Podcast

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 25-06-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Innovation teams Product teams Business Analyst

What is the key competence of our business analysts (BA) We talked about domain knowledge, tech affinity and building bridges between stakeholders and software engineers. Sometimes the business analyst is almost seen as a project manager. Aligning with product owners is key in this role. Every business analysts within bol.com fills in this role differently but about one thing they are very clear; for our business analysts curiosity is key. Time to dive into this BA role. We see this role as a key to success in our multidisciplinary product…

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Maximize cloud benefits – Podcast

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 16-06-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: cloud scaling

  Next level leveraging cloud computing  We moved 70% of our services to the cloud and new services start in the cloud unless… Time to dive into a topic brought up by our tech leads. Want to know how you can maximize your cloud benefits? Alexandra wrote a blog post on Horizontal Pod Auto-scaling, HPA. It triggered us for this episode. Maximizing cloud benefits can be done in many different ways. For this episode, we dive into auto-scaling. Cloud computing brings great features for scaling up and down based on…

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