The Spaces Championship – our code competition

It was briefly mentioned in our episode on Advent of Code. We also started an internal Coding Championship. Spaces Championship. Let’s dive into this and find out what it is all about. From our personal experience, we know that is easier to train and improve when we are in a competition. Could it be that the same mechanism is here at work too? Let us know when you think we should open-up this competition externally as well, goto Linkedin, mailto: techlab@bol.com or twitter us: @bol_com_Techlab Guests Harmen Prins – Software…

The Spaces Championship – our code competition

Everybody is a UX Researcher

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 17-01-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: UX Innovation research customer centric user

In this episode, we talk to Marieke and Tadeusz since we were intrigued by the title of their meetup presentation: Everybody is a UX Researcher. Since we didn’t consider ourselves a UX Researcher before we wanted to know more about the subject. And we wanted to find out if being a UX Researcher could also improve our daily professional lives. And in the end, we actually think it can. Hope you enjoy the talk too. Guests In an earlier episode, we talked with Marieke Linssen about the future of voice and…

10 takeaways from KotlinConf

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 8-01-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: skills Kotlin software engineering Podcast KotlinConf

A group of Kotlin enthusiast joined KotlinConf back in December last year in Copenhagen. We invited this group to share their learnings for this conference. Two of the participants are sharing their takeaways from KotlinConf with you. Our first podcast was about the adoption of Kotlin at bol.com. Hope you will also enjoy this episode and our second season. Guests Cas Plattel; Software Engineer in the Fintech domain Oscar Spruit; Software Engineer in the Apps domain Hosts Peter Brouwers Peter Paul van de Beek Shownotes KotlinConf KotlinConf 2019 on youtube

Advent of Code 2019

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 19-12-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Java Software skills gamification software engineering Algorithms Problem solving

The subject of this podcast episode is totally in line with the holiday season. Time for the advent calendars in many different formats. One of these formats is the Advent of Code 2019! The bol.com Tech Community is participating in this event. In this episode, we talk with 2 participants and discover what it is all about. We explore what it could do. Our software engineers see it as a good way to sharpen their problem solving and a good exercise for the upcoming bol.com spaces programming championship. Some become really competitive. Guests Erik…

Dealing with Technical Debt – an experiment

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 10-12-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Technical Debt Software Development Experiment

One of the aspects that keep popping up in software development: Technical Debt. Some created on purpose, for example, to get features into production fast. Some just came into existence… So, what is Technical Debt? And how to fight it. According to the definition* it can be compared to monetary debt. If technical debt is not repaid, it can accumulate ‘interest’, making it harder to implement changes later on. A couple of weeks ago George approached us and said, it might be an interesting topic to discuss because in my team an…

Dealing with Technical Debt – an experiment

How we tame Google Cloud resources with R2D2

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 4-12-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Autonomy cloud Infrastructure R2D2

How we tame Google Cloud resources with R2D2. We had some episodes on the cloud already. Now it’s time to discuss how bol.com combines the promises of the cloud and their requirements for Reproducibility and Reliability. For instance, balance infinite resources and ultimate autonomy with security. Within bol.com we developed R2D2. R2D2 stands for our Reproducible Resource Deployment Definition tool which combines the functions of Terraform, Cloud SDK and Puppet Labs. It helps us to ensure Recovery, Security, Self-service, Stability and Scalability in our move to the cloud. The reason…

Hackathon

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 27-11-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Software Innovation hackathon Robotics

The angle for this episode of our podcast is hackathons. At the time of the recording, there was one going on in our headquarters in Utrecht. What is a hackathon? Why do we organise them? And we talk about some of the initiatives at the current hackathon. The results of the hackathon were showed during the demotime a week after the hackathon. Out of the 20 projects the jury came up with a top 3 and handed over the cup. Guests Kardelen Hatun – Software engineer in the Retails Platform…

Young Professional Program

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 20-11-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: skills Culture Engineering Culture Podcast Learn Young Professional Program YP

In this episode, we talk about growing talent. We dive into how we approach this as bol.com in our Young Professional Program. Also called YPs. On our recruitment web site, we call this “the IT journey of a lifetime”. Is that just marketing or is there more to it? Guests Bojan Filipovic; software engineer in team Bond, in the content fleet. Just graduated from the young professional program. Martin Cekodhima; software engineer in 4B – financial processing – even sexier than Bond. It’s FinTech in an e-commerce company, need we…

The state of Reactive Streams

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 14-11-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Java Architecture skills Reactive Reactive Streams Reactor RSocket

The state of Reactive Streams – watch the presentation and listen to the podcast. International Keynote speaker Oleh Dokuka gave a presentation on the state of Reactive Streams at bol.com. We took advantage of this opportunity and interviewed him for the podcast. The Reactive Streams specification is state of the art for asynchronous, non-blocking data streams with the fine-grained flow control. Clearly, that was done for a good future… but, does it have any future nowadays? How other programming ecosystems reacted to the appearance of the reactive-streams standard and did they adopted that…

Women in Tech

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 7-11-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Community skills way of working Diversity

This episode is on women in tech. Our guests are two speakers at the upcoming European Women in Tech Conference later this month in Amsterdam. To be honest, if we look at the hosts of this podcast and if we look at our guest list of the past episodes… It is still a subject that requires attention. In an earlier episode we talked about diversity in terms of cultural aspects and in this episode we might find out what the women/men diversity brings into tech. At least that was the idea when we started.…

UX Research to support the partners on our platform

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 1-11-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: UX Innovation Partners bol.com Podcast platform research portal

In this episode, we talk about User Interfaces (UI) and User Experience(UX). Since this is a very visible topic, everybody has an opinion on it. Even though I’m not working on our webshop I get unsolicited feedback on a regular basis. Where a lot of the UX Design discussion focuses on our webshop. We choose another focus for this episode. The UI that is not common to most of our users but is very much needed for a large part of our 23.000 plaza partners. The Seller DashboarD or SDD in short. The User…

UX Research to support the partners on our platform

The Road to Devoxx

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 23-10-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Community Podcast Devvox Presenting storytelling devoxx

In this episode, we talk about a way to be inspired and inspiring others, learn from each other and grow your network: Conferences! And more in detail our colleague’s road to Devoxx Belgium 2019. At bol.com we are challenged to present our stories inside and outside bol.com. Inside bol.com we have our great Spaces Summit and meetups, Outside we speak at several conferences. That seems more challenging to a lot of colleagues. Especially if it is a conference of 5 days, over 200 speakers and sessions and over 3200 attendees. And our…

Prepare for the most wonderful time of the year – Season Readiness

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 16-10-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Peak Season Peak Sinterklaas Santa Claus Black Friday Singles Day Load testing SRE

In this episode we dive deeper into the IT aspects of a business topic. How to prepare for the peak load of the season – Black Friday, Sinterklaas, Christmas and even Singles Day is included. That is traditional a period where the load of basically everything increases dramatically. The slogan of the Season Readiness project that is preparing for all this is “Deliver careless holidays for our customer”. During this period every piece of the puzzle must fit. When load triples items like scaling, reliability, page load-times, predictability, up-times and…

Prepare for the most wonderful time of the year – Season Readiness

Small Web Apps

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 10-10-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Architecture Front-End Podcast

Our Small Web Apps or SWAPs, in short, are something like the SOA for Front-End. We aim for separate deployable parts of the Front-End we have available for our Plaza partners, suppliers and internal users. In the Front-End we also encountered that we had teams waiting for each other before they could bring functionality to Pro. Basically, because the Front-End became a monolith. Besides that, people realized that we needed to deliver the same functionality in different Front-Ends. For instance content management for our internal product managers and for our external sellers (Plaza…

API development for the retail platform

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 3-10-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Architecture Development API Podcast platform

In this episode of the podcast, we talk about API development for the retail platform. A very important subject for a retail platform like bol.com. Given that we are a platform we have a lot of partners to interact with. To do that in a neat way we need APIs. And as a platform, we are multi-sided so we have to offer different APIs for different groups of users. So a lot of interesting aspects to cover. Guests Jarno Walgemoed; Owner at Sourcelabs; Software engineer with a strong focus on partner API’s…

Redesign for the cloud – horizontal scaling

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 26-09-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Architecture Scalability cloud Podcast redesign

We think “the Cloud” is to broad a subject to handle in one episode of the podcast. That is why we break down our cloud journey in small pieces and go over them in separate episodes. This time we dive into “Redesign for the cloud – horizontal scaling”. In an earlier episode we discussed how we moved our Big Data to the Cloud, in the Cloud as an enabler to becoming more data-driven. When moving applications and services to the Cloud we think about redesigning them, like in this case…

Redesign for the cloud – horizontal scaling

Coaching – more impact with Human Systems Engineering

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 11-09-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Podcast way of working Coaching

In this podcast, we talk with two of our coaches in tech about making an impact on the performance of teams and people. The reference they use to do this is called Human System Engineering. In bol.com we have different types of coaches with different focus areas. Outside tech, or bol.com wide so to say, we have coaches for careers, personal coaches and SPARK coaches. SPARK is our holocracy/network way of working. Burgert joined bol.com recently and was asked to reflect on what he encountered during his first months. We…

Coaching – more impact with Human Systems Engineering

Measuring 2.0 – Streaming measurements

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 6-09-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Web scale Architecture Scalability BigData data Podcast Conversational Measuring recommendations personalization

The big question in this episode is “How can we create 10 million personalized webshops? Tailormade for every one of our customers so it suites their needs best?” In short, the answering is Measuring 2.0. This enables us to measure more accurately how customers are behaving in our webshop. This enables to give them a more personalized experience. We are aiming for a feedback loop of 1 second. So 1 second after and action was performed by a customer in our webshop the data is available for service that handles personalization and recommendations. These…

Formule X – Accelerate your organisation

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 29-08-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Agile Scrum Innovation Organizing Speed Acceleration

In this episode of the podcast, we talk about accelerating organisations. We invited Jurriaan Kamer and Rini van Solingen to our studio. They recently launched their book – Formule X – Hoe zorg je voor extreme versnelling in je organisatie – at bol.com. The English version, How to reach extreme acceleration in your organization, will be available before the holiday season. The subject of the book how to accelerate your organization is closely related to many subjects we talked about in our podcast series. For instance Agile at Scale and Speeding…

Formule X – Accelerate your organisation

Interaction Design – Celebrate Failure

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 21-08-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: UX Innovation skills Podcast Fail Failure Learn

Where do we learn most in our lives? When things that we do succeed, or when we do stuff and they don’t turn out how we expected? They “fail”. Exactly, we can learn a lot from our failures. How does this relate to Tech? Or, to be more precise, how does that relate to the design of the webshop? And how do we know if we succeed or fail, is it a gut feeling or do we learn through structured research? In this episode, we explore the theme of success, failure and learning together with…

Testing in autonomous teams – speed is everything

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 14-08-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Testing Culture Engineering Culture Test automation Podcast

Testing in autonomous teams – speed is everything The role of testers has evolved in the last decade. Test automation has become the norm. So, testers have grown more towards developers. What are the skills they need to succeed? With the rise of autonomous teams and product teams, more and more tasks of testers moved to other roles like developers. What knowledge must be spread over these roles to ensure that we can release to PRO without fearing what will happen? And there have been other evolutions like the one…

Cloud as Enabler to become more data driven

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 7-08-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: BigData DataScience cloud Podcast Business Intelligence

Cloud as Enabler to become more data driven. The adjective data driven means that progress in an activity is compelled by data, rather than by intuition, personal experience or a gut feeling. Googling data driven gives you over 637 mln. results so time to add an extra result to this with this episode. But we wanted to make it more specific. We moved or big data into the cloud and we had some nice insights that we want to share. We asked our two guests of this episode to do…

‘OK Google…..’ – the future of voice is here

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 31-07-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: cloud Podcast Interaction Design Voice Google

‘OK Google…..’ – the future of voice is here. Everybody with a Google Assistant on their phone or with Google Speakers installed uses this command more and more. It’s even used by radio DJ’s to make fun and just shout out commands to see what’s happening. And you know when people start making jokes with it, it’s becoming a success. There is a future for interaction by voice. Time to talk about this success with our two guests who were part of the team that introduced the future of voice…

Agile at Scale – Reality is complex, don’t expect simple solutions

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 24-07-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Web scale Scalability Agile Scrum Podcast Product teams Agile@scale Flight level Business Agility

Agile at Scale. Ever since we started our journey into Agile and scrum, we have been wondering whether we were on the right path for business and IT agility. Way back when we were with 7 scrum teams scaling wasn’t the most important issue. With our growth came challenges for scaling our agile way of working. We have been on a few plateaus where we were searching for the next step, as have been other companies on the same venture. Today we talk about some of the things we learned…

Agile at Scale – Reality is complex, don’t expect simple solutions

Audiobooks – How to introduce the Netflix for reading?

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 17-07-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Development Android development Podcast Ios Development launch audiobooks

As podcast makers, we are very happy that we can talk about a subject that is very close to ours. In this episode, we talk about one of the recent product launches. The launch of audiobooks. Besides the already existing “all you can read subscription” we developed an Audiobook subscription together with Rakuten Kobo. In the world that is dominated by pictures and movies the book itself and reading are under pressure. But we also see that the audience for listening on demand is growing if you look at the…

Audiobooks – How to introduce the Netflix for reading?

Software Parade; the fun way to create an overview of hundreds of applications in Neo4J

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 10-07-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Architecture Microservices YBIYRIYLI Podcast software parade Neo4j graph database

One of the challenges in a (micro-)service landscape is to keep track of all capabilities in the services. Another is to keep track of the consumers of your service and the consumers beyond. Taking our IT landscape as an example: we work with over 120 teams on over 850 different applications varying from services, GUI’s, services, data builders and other types of applications. In an environment like ours, it’s crucial to understand what applications we have, what functionality they offer and who are working on them. In the past, the…

Software Parade; the fun way to create an overview of hundreds of applications in Neo4J

Scary close to fully autonomous teams at Onefootball

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 3-07-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Agile Spaces Summit Podcast way of working Product teams

This is a special episode of the bol.com Techlab Podcast. It’s recorded on at our own Tech Conference the bol.com spaces summit. Directly after Jim gave his presentation about ‘scary close to fully autonomous teams at Onefootball’ we interviewed him. We had a great presentation at Spaces Summit with the Title: “scary close to fully autonomous teams”. Within bol.com we strive for autonomous teams because we believe that we will go faster, are more agile and we have more fun. But it is also great to hear from people outside…

Scary close to fully autonomous teams at Onefootball

Spaces Summit 2019 – Part II

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 27-06-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Java Event kubernetes Spaces Summit Podcast Tech Community

Three years ago, a group of enthusiastic engineers gathered together during the Friday drinks. They wanted to interact more in the growing organization. Learn more from each other by sharing cool stories. The plan for a bol.com tech summit was born, they called it Spaces Summit. Three years later the 3rd edition in succession is organized by a dedicated team of committed engineers. It’s the 13th of June and the Techlab Podcast team is on the Spaces Summit 2019 location to give you an impression of the Spaces Summit. In the previous episode of the podcast we interviewed one…

Spaces Summit 2019 – Part I

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 20-06-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Java Event Software Community teams Spaces Summit Podcast

Three years ago a group of enthusiastic engineers gathered together during the Friday drinks. They wanted to interact more in the growing organization. Learn more from each other by sharing cool stories. The plan for a bol.com tech summit was born, they called it Spaces Summit. Three years later the 3rd edition in succession is organized by a dedicated team of committed engineers. It’s the 13th of June and the Techlab Podcast team is on the Spaces Summit location to give you an impression of the Spaces Summit. We interviewed one of the committee members to tell you the What, Why…

Cultural Diversity – It all starts with yourself

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 12-06-2019
Category: Podcast

In this episode, we touch upon a cultural aspect of Tech within bol.com, Cultural Diversity. Over the last couple of years, our international community especially in IT in bol.com grew from 5 in 2014 to 120 in 2019 out of a total of 450 people in Tech. As a former Dutch company, you can imagine that this brings a lot of potential and it also has its challenges. In the week of the 21st of May, the World Day of Cultural Diversity, bol.com celebrated this with Cultural Diversity Week. For…

Cultural Diversity – It all starts with yourself

Axle the opinionated support for bol.com scrum teams

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 6-06-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Java Podcast Axle Spring Boot

In this episode, we talk about Axle. Axle is our internal framework for building Java-based applications. Well actually as you will learn in this episode it is not a framework. It is an opinionated approach to building Java applications like Spring Boot is an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with a minimum of hassle. Since internally we use the same thing for cross-cutting concerns like logging and metrics these all come out of the box when using Axle. Besides that, it…

Performance boost the pick algorithm in the warehouse

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 29-05-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: cloud Algorithms Warehouse scaling performance flexibility

In this episode we dive into the world were e-commerce becomes physical. We talk about the bol.com Fulfilment Center (BFC). Within these centres, we have several challenges and one of these challenges has to do with the picking algorithm. The pick algorithm determines the route in a warehouse that is performed to pick all the products for a set of customers. As bol.com we have very high volumes of products that we must send from our warehouses to customers every day. So, it makes sense to optimize the distance that…

Performance boost the pick algorithm in the warehouse

Improve the customer journey with Intent Recognition and Conversational Analytics

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 23-05-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: DataScience Machine Learning Natural language processing Customer Support Predictive Models Comprehender

In this episode, we talk with Daniel and Emiel, software engineer and product owner in the customer support domain. In this domain, the focus is to help our customers in the best way possible. But what if we can prevent the customer to feel the need to contact bol.com in the first place, they asked themselves. They realized this can be possible using the analyses of the various customer interactions we have via the Chatbot “Billie”, live chat, phone and email. For these analyses, they introduced techniques from the Data…

Improve the customer journey with Intent Recognition and Conversational Analytics

From zero to PRO: Using GO @ bol.com

Peter Brouwers, on 7-05-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Open source Golang go Development cloud software engineering Podcast

In this episode we talk about GO. Go is not a language that is used the most at bol.com. That’s is Java, together with Kotlin. In 2014 it was introduced for the first time and reached a steady but not so big user group. Recently, along with the move to the cloud, we experience a second wave of adoption. When you listen to the stories our two enthusiastic guests share in this episode, you might even believe Go is the future. Guests Rogier Lommers Tom Stoepker Hosts Peter Brouwers Peter…

No more crystal ball for forecasting, data science it is

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 7-05-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: BigData DataScience software engineering Artificial Intelligence Podcast

As long as retail exists, people tried to predict the future. An accurate forecast makes it much easier to buy the correct amount of products from suppliers, know what you need to keep on stock and even know what the sales will do with specific promotions. Over the last couple of years, this domain changed dramatically because of the introduction of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. In this episode, we chat about this changing playing field to share our experiences with you. Guests Harmen Prins Erick Webbe Hosts Peter Brouwers…

No more crystal ball for forecasting, data science it is

Our Kotlin adoption journey

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 2-05-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Development Kotlin software engineering Podcast Technology

Kotlin was first used by our teams a couple of years ago. It had an interesting start that shows how we adopt technology in general. In different feature teams a group of software engineers explored their own use cases for Kotlin. Some very enthusiastic, some a bit more skeptical and eventually they found each other. A new community in bol.com was born, the Kotlin community. In this episode we talk about this journey, the use cases, the adaption and the impact on frameworks that we use in our feature teams. Guests…

Introduction to our upcoming bol.com Techlab podcast episodes

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 1-05-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Development Engineering Culture Podcast Tech Community platform

“Welcome to the bol.com Tech Podcast. In this podcast we share our experience with you to learn and entertain. Peeking behind the screens of IT and Tech in general at bol.com. Showing you our approach to IT, e-commerce and retail platforms.” This is our opening sentence of the upcoming episodes of the bol.com Tech podcast. In this introduction episode we like to share with you: What is this podcast about, why did we start it and why should you listen to it? We hope that you enjoy the podcasts as…

Introduction to our upcoming bol.com Techlab podcast episodes