Podcast – 85 articles

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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A lot of tech people are leaders – Podcast

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 3-06-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: leadership Carreer

Writing an article is reflection, publishing it is getting feedback Learning from our colleagues. That is important to us. So, we were delighted when we found another great piece of this on LinkedIn, Elinore shared. to inspire others who are thinking of transitioning from tech into a leadership role or are just curious about my experiences and thoughts. The transition from tech into a leadership role is actually a very hot topic and not only within bol.com. We learn this from the job interviews when candidates ask us about career…

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The 5th anniversary of the Spaces Summit – Podcast

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 27-05-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Conferences Culture Engineering Culture Summit Spaces Summit

From how it was born to what it is now in 45 minutes One of the things that make us really proud about working in Tech at bol.com is our annual Space Summit. Our internal tech conference by developers for developers. And maybe you can recall we had quite some interesting episodes, blogs and videos about it and some of the talks given there in the last 2 years. This year is a special edition! We celebrate our 5th anniversary!! In June 2018 Peter published an article on Linkedin with…

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Data Maturity and Data Literacy – Podcast

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 5-05-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: DataScience data driven data maturity data literacy

Data Maturity Model as common ground, Data Literacy Model to measure the level of speaking, writing and reading data To state as a company we want to become more data-driven is the first step. To truly understand what this means and define a common ground to discuss the progress is the second. Back in the eighties, the Capability Maturity Model was defined to develop and refine software development processes. Later on, many more Maturity Models were introduced like the Business Maturity Model, the Lean Maturity Model and Agile Maturity Model.…

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The data-driven approach to supporting products with KPIs and OKRs – Podcast

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 22-04-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Goals Innovation Product OKR KPI data driven

Supporting products with KPI’s and OKR’s We had previous episodes on how bol.com is moving to a product organization. In this one, we’ll dive into how to measure the success of these products and set objectives for them. Including measuring whether we are getting the desired results. Being the data-driven company that we want to be we asked our data people to help us to get the right KPI’s for all our product and support the products in defining proper OKR’s. Data availability should never be an excuse to not…

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Father & Son into IT – Podcast

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 16-04-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Security software engineering internship

Every time I look at you. I see myself. I’m so proud of you. For you help make me what I am. A better man. I’m just so proud of you. ~ Lyrics by Alain Clark A special episode comes with a special opening. In February we had an extraordinary occasion during our onboarding. Father and Son in the same ‘virtual room. Father started as Software Engineer in the bol.com security department and son started as… Software Engineer in the security department, doing his final intern assignment. We have got…

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Software engineers on Duty – so you sleep well at night

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 31-03-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Agile Innovation devops Engineering Culture Operations Site Reliability Engineering on duty

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. But every company taking his 24/7 run seriously has to organize their on call duty in a scalable and sustainable way. Initially bol.com organized it in a traditional way, meaning a team of system engineers with different specialism took care of the duty. Only a couple of years ago…

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What you should know building a Tech Lead community – Podcast

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 26-03-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Engineering Culture Tech Lead

Don’t miss our story of the introduction of the Tech Leads During the podcast, you will find out what Tech Leads are and why we need to build this community of Tech Leads at bol.com. You will learn how we approached this and avoid hiding the Tech Leads in ivory towers. The two tech leads and an IT director share best practices and pitfalls (and what we learned from them). The Why and What of our Tech Lead Community Tech Lead Community Why did we start to define the role?…

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Applied Improv in Business

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 2-03-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Culture Engineering Culture way of working improv applied improv

Introduction Peter is very honest in this episode (the stage is not the place he is really comfortable at) and Peter Paul is sharing his first experience with Improv (is it a small trauma Peter Paul?). So time to talk about Improv, Improvisation Theatre and applied Improv because we do want to learn about it and we are really curious how this relates to our Tech Community. Our guest Burgert prepared this along with these main topics Mindset, Skills, Culture, Structures and Who benefits. Mindset – Relates to the Improv…

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Google Assistant – The potential of brand recognition

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 18-02-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Voice Google Assistant Brand Recognition Google Dialog Flow

Introduction In July 2019 we had our first podcast episode on voice and Google Assistant. Back then Marieke and Marvin introduced us to the future of interaction by voice. In this episode, we dive into the potential of brand recognition. Many people in The Netherlands will recognize the voice we use in our commercials on radio, television and social media as the voice of bol.com. The value of this brand recognition is the starting point of the journey to get this voice into the Google Assistant. By doing so we…

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