Applied Improv in Business

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…

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…

The YP Bookclub – Never Split the Difference – Podcast

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 4-02-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Books

Introduction Another week another book discussion. Maybe we can start a second Techlab Podcast dedicated to interesting books? We got some great responses on the last week’s episode about team topologies and we had a good opportunity. So it is time for the Never Split the Difference – Podcast. In earlier episodes, we talked with YP’s about their side projects (behind the mask – platform for the hospital to share experiences and Real-time sales dashboard), about the YP program itself and participating in competitions, the BAPC2020. This time we sit…

The YP Bookclub – Never Split the Difference – Podcast

Team Topologies a DSL for organizational design – Podcast

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 26-01-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Design Product teams Sociotechnical Architecture Team Topologies organisation

Introduction A lot of people involved in the design and structuring of organizations could learn a lot from the book Team Topologies. Our guest describes it in the episode a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for organizational design and evolution. The header of the website and the subtitle of the suggest that it is the way for organizing business and technology teams for fast flow. In the episode, we discuss the 4 kind of teams and the 3 ways of interactions between these teams that are at the core of Team…

Team Topologies a DSL for organizational design – Podcast

TypeScript, where we love strict

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 22-01-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Development Front-End software engineering JavaScript programminglanguage Typescript

Introduction It sparked in the episode Interactive heavy applications we should record a podcast episode on TypeScript. Around the same time, we came in contact with Hackages. A company focusing on learning tech. Time to bring the engineers together and dive deeper into TypeScript. Typescript is mentioned amongst the 5 most promising languages in 2020. We talk about: What is typescript and how do you benefit? What are good implementation strategies? Bol.com examples Examples from Hackages Maturity in the usage of Typescript Guests Niels van Midden; Front End software engineer…

GraphQL – start but start small

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 13-01-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Development software engineering API GraphQL Rest Definition

Introduction We want to share our approach to IT to learn and entertain you. In this episode, we are happy to have an external guest at the table discussing with our internal guest. GraphQL stands for Graph Query Language and is used for interacting with services from the frontend. We are talking about API’s here. Explore with us the possibilities this approach has to offer and how it could even help you to speeds up innovation in the front-end. Like our guest mentions: GraphQL is a specification not an implementation…

BAPC2020 – Olympic spirit or serious business?

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 4-01-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Culture software engineering Engineering Culture Young Professional Program YP Championship competition BAPC

Introduction No rhythm like algorithms. We have been talking in the podcast about programming contest before. For example, about our own Spaces Championship and Advent of code, which also takes place at the end of the year. Today we’ll be talking to some participants in the BAPC – The Benelux Algorithm Programming Contest. Like stated on the website of BAPC, it is a contest in which about 90 teams from leading universities in Luxemburg, Belgium and The Netherlands participate. The teams have to solve a series of algorithmic problems and…

The Storybook story

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 18-12-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Testing Development Front-End frontend TDD Mindset frontend development App First Storybook

Introduction It happens a lot that listening to a podcast sparks new questions. So, after our episode on Front-End quality, we wanted to know more about Storybook. This coincided with some people reaching out to us to collaborate in the podcast. And look where we are now: creating a new podcast on this subject. We asked our selves the question: Could it be the holy grail for front end development? Topics discussed: What is Storybook? What problems does it solve? How does it support app development? What does the Add-on…

Service Mesh – a must have for a dynamic infrastructure

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 3-12-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: cloud kubernetes Infrastructure istio service mesh network

Introduction Weaving a Service Mesh for Multiple Clusters at bol.com – that was the title for the presentation our guests gave during the virtual KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2020 earlier this year. This triggered our curiosity. We have questions like what is this service mesh about? Why do we need it? How did we implement it? Guests Remco Overdijk; Tech Lead Provisioning Fleet / Expert System Engineer at bol.com. You might know him from the episode where we spoke about Kubernetes. James Brook; Cloud Solutions Architect at Google Hosts Peter Brouwers…

Real Time Sales – In 100ms from sales to dashboard

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 25-11-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Young Professional Culture data RSocket R2DBC Reactive programming Vue3 Kotlin Coroutines dashboard Rapid feedback Sales Real-Time

Introduction One of the purposes of this podcast is to share our unique bol.com culture with you. Traditions play an important part in culture. So, in this episode, we share a view on the evolution of a tradition. A tradition that underlines our focus on data. In this sales season, everybody in bol.com wants to know how we are doing, preferably Real-Time. With the latest version of the Real-Time Sales dashboard, our guests managed to get the information within 100ms from sales to the dashboard. If you are one of…

Real Time Sales – In 100ms from sales to dashboard

To become official F/OSS committer and eventually PMC member

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 19-11-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Community Open source F/OSS

Introduction In this episode we are sharing something that is unique at least in the Tech Community here at bol.com. To become official F/OSS committer and eventually PMC member. Without spoiling too much, I think this contribution will make a positive impact far beyond the bol.com Tech landscape and serve in an enormous number of companies. Helping engineers all over the planet. Hoping to inspire you as well to become official F/OSS committer and eventually PMC member. Our guest is the first bol.com employee to become official committer to the…

To become official F/OSS committer and eventually PMC member

Proof data consistency in a micro service landscape

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 6-11-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Architecture Microservices data Quality Bigquery Data Consistency

Introduction Even if it doesn’t appeal to you, you might want to think about it when you work in a larger microservice landscape or have a serious big data platform…Proof data consistency in a microservice landscape. When we google this subject I already get 1.2 MLN results so there’s something going on here. To ensure data consistency several practices are available: Saga Pattern Reconciliation Event Log Orchestration vs. Choreography Single-Write With Events Change-First Event-First Consistency by Design Accepting Inconsistency But in this episode, we won’t go over these practices. We…

Proof data consistency in a micro service landscape

Front End Quality in an interactive-heavy application

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 28-10-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Testing Agile UX Development Front-End Quality Test automation Playbook

Introduction In this episode, we show a little of our front-end love. And our love for testing and enjoying the quality of a good front-end. It was time for that because the last time we talked about front end related stuff was quit some episodes ago. We are going to talk about Front End Quality in an interactive-heavy application. First, we discuss two statements/dilemmas: Testing is always balancing. Time vs. Quality: How much time to spent on getting all the cases (interactions) and edge cases clear vs. the level of…

Front End Quality in an interactive-heavy application

Behind the Mask – Young Professionals contributing to the online platform for healthcare

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 19-10-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Community Innovation skills support

Today we take a look behind the mask. The moment we recorded this podcast episode the 2nd wave of Corona is hitting The Netherlands. In the first wave, the Corona crisis was causing a lot of pressure and stress on our healthcare system and nurses & caretakers specifically. With a couple of IT Young Professionals, we are helping a great project called “Behind The Mask”. It is a joint effort of UMC Utrecht, TU Delft and Erasmus MC. The project aims to help nurses maintain mental and physical health by providing an online platform where…

Behind the Mask – Young Professionals contributing to the online platform for healthcare

Let’s get Ethical

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 12-10-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Culture Tech Community Ethics Books

“This is how we do IT”, is the slogan of our Techlab site and podcast. Every now and then we reach out to external guests to learn from them and exchange ideas. We are really happy to have this external guest in our show to talk about “Let’s get ethical”. This multi-talent released her book ‘De bubbel’ mid 2019 after 15 years at Google, Spotify and Booking.com. She writes columns for the Dutch newspaper FD. One of those was the reason for me to reach out and invite her to…

Sociotechnical Architecture to maximize impact

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 24-09-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Innovation teams software engineering customer centric Sociotechnical Architecture Software Architect velocity

In this episode, we touch a field that we don’t explore that much, Architecture. To be more precise: Sociotechnical Architecture to maximize impact. In a way, it’s strange since Peter Paul has worked as an architect for quite a while. On the website of our guest, esilva.net, it’s called “co-design organizational and technical systems to maximize impact”. We think there is so much to explore in these words Sociotechnical Architecture so we asked Eduardo to join this show. <picture source> We discuss what it is and also, why it is…

Moving to multilingual, first step Wallonia

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 16-09-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: scale multilingual French Wallonia Ownership Consistency App First

Bonjour ! Félicitations messieurs, il y a seulement deux semaines, que le bol.com application multilingue est disponible dans les app-stores. That’s how we started this episode. Congratulate our guests with the launch of the multilingual bol.com app. It was launched in the French-speaking part of Belgium, Wallonia. With this launch, over 5 million French-speaking Belgians were able to shop in their native language. In this episode, we dive into this move to multilingual that started two years ago. After the ‘why’ and ‘when’ we go into the ‘how’. From both…

Moving to multilingual, first step Wallonia

Site Reliability Engineering; that’s music to my ears!

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 10-09-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Agile Innovation devops SRE Software Development Operations Site Reliability Engineering SLI SLO SLA

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. In this episode, we share the experience we gained on our journey. Guests Bart Enkelaar; Software Engineer and SRE advocate in bol.com and external speaker and friend of the show (SRE during…

Site Reliability Engineering; that’s music to my ears!

Shifting gears to maximize your personal productivity

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 3-09-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: skills teams Personal Productivity OKR North Star

Welcome back after the summer holidays! Hope you were able to enjoy an awesome break. We took some time to prepare some great podcast episodes for you. Holidays, always a nice moment to reflect on things. One of the things might be your personal development and productivity. Saying yes to too many things, do these things add to my personal development, how do you keep track on all these commitments, how do you ensure you don’t drown and eventually don’t be productive at all. Sounds familiar to you these questions?…

Shifting gears to maximize your personal productivity

Simulation, building the digital twin of our warehouse on experiments

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 29-07-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: DataScience Innovation BFC Warehouse Experiment Simulation Digital Twin

In this episode, we take another look, a fresh perspective on Data Science for Logistics. In earlier episodes, we talked about related topics like Forecasting and crafting a Picking Algorithm using Data Science. With the guests of this episode, we dive into two specific challenges in the warehousing domain, the cost-based selection is the first one and the second is put-away with simulation as the red line. During the recording, we found out that our guests have a big dream: realizing the Digital Twin of the bol.com fulfilment centre. But…

Simulation, building the digital twin of our warehouse on experiments

Looking back at 55 episodes

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 16-07-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Community Culture Retro Tech Community

We changed roles for this unique episode. And why is that? We are going to look back on the first 55 episodes. So, Peter Paul and Peter will be the guests of this show and Niels Kuiper and Bruno Lauwers will be your host. Our motto is ‘sharing is caring’. So, practise what you preach and share the podcast journey as well. That was what we had in mind. We share how it all started over a year ago. We dive into the learnings and memorable moments. We were asked…

Love your logging

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 9-07-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Java Web scale Microservices devops YBIYRIYLI logging non-functional Metrics tracing

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. One of the subjects that we did not really touch yet in our podcast is non-functionals. Today we take a closer look at logging. An aspect that typically fills some of the non-functionals or -ilities. Love your logs and Love the people after you. For the first time in the history of the bol.com Techlab…

Great products are build on a great Product Architecture

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 2-07-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Architecture Agile Innovation Agile@scale Product

Today we explore our product architecture. We have been talking with Jim van de Waal about product organizations. We spoke to our Agile at Scale friends about product organisations and Agile at Scale. Now it is time to talk about the foundation to build these on. We call this the product architecture. We believe that a lot of companies are in the same transformation. Years ago we dealt with a ‘monolith architecture’. We transformed this architecture in a ‘microservices architecture’. And now it’s time for the next logical step in…

Great products are build on a great Product Architecture

Women in tech encourage inclusion in tech

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 24-06-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Culture Diversity Inclusion Women in Tech

Once again we are sharing our diversity and inclusion stories. We discuss how women in tech at bol.com encourage inclusion in tech. The idea for this podcast stems from of course the importance of the subject but also from the diversity and inclusion month we have at bol.com. In June and November last year we spoke about diversity and women in tech in the podcast with several guests. Let’s see what the latest developments and insights are, given that there has been a lot of attention to the subject in…

Women in tech encourage inclusion in tech

Innovation Rhythm – How to drink less coffee and achieve more

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 17-06-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Innovation scale Culture way of working Product teams Agile@scale WoW Product management Transformation

Ever since we recorded the podcast about Agile @ Scale, we wanted some of the people involved again in our show. We care about the topic. Think there is a lot to tell and learn. And it is of interest to a lot of our listeners. That is why at least we think it is awesome that this episode is about Innovation Rhythm – How to drink less coffee and achieve more. In the first Agile@Scale episode we talked about the ‘Why’ of Agile@Scale, the flight levels of Klaus Leopold.…

Innovation Rhythm – How to drink less coffee and achieve more

How is life with Jim van der Waal – Product Manager at Onefootball

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 10-06-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Agile Innovation Product management autonomous teams

Almost a year ago we spoke to Jim van der Waal, a former colleague and now working as a Product Manager at OneFootball. Back then he had just delivered his presentation: “Scary close to autonomous teams” during the Spaces Summit 2019. Recently Jim posted a range of blog posts, with topics like: Product Owner vs. Product Manager: what is the difference? Making SLO’s fast Product Teams: striving for Autonomy & reaching for Business Agility Which triggered questions like: Would the teams be fully autonomous now? How are things with Jim? What did…

How is life with Jim van der Waal – Product Manager at Onefootball

Dealing with stress in the tech sector

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 3-06-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Community Resilience skills way of working

In this episode, we are exploring a topic that is definitely work-related but not that tech-related: Dealing with stress in the tech sector. At bol.com we have at least twice a year an employee engagement survey. Some of the questions are about how the workload is perceived. If you look at the results they differ per domain. So, context is very important. As is being pressured by deadlines. Our guest reached out to us with the following message: “For all of us working in the tech sector most of us…

Spaces Summit goes virtual – Organising our internal tech conference

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 28-05-2020
Category: Culture, Podcast Tags: Conferences Spaces Summit

Spaces Summit in corona time means Spaces Summit goes virtual. Maybe you remember from last year that we have an annual internal tech conference at bol.com. Given the measures, in place, we can’t come together. So, we go for a digital online equivalent. We wanted to know what it takes to organise an event like this? But we found out there’s an even more important step before. It’s getting the answer to the question “what are we going to do?” Many people and organisations who are organizing conferences, meetups, summits…

Spaces Summit goes virtual – Organising our internal tech conference

Using Data Science for Marketing Attribution

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 20-05-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: DataScience Innovation Marketing Marketing Attribution

The topic of this show is exactly why we like to be the hosts of this podcast. We learn a lot about all areas in our business. In this show, we dive into the marketing domain. We will learn about models like multi-touch, lift studies, time decay, and more. We talk about Data Science for Marketing Attribution. Put simply, marketing attribution is the analytical science of determining which marketing tactics are contributing to sales or conversions. And then there is a Data Science twist to this. Guests Ernst Kuiper; Data…

Using Data Science for Marketing Attribution

Opening our Data Treasure Chest with Tableau

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 23-04-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: BigData data Business Intelligence BI Tableau Atscale Bigquery

Turning to business analytics this episode, we discover it’s a broad field. Business Intelligence hasn’t been discussed that much yet in our podcast. So, we are excited to learn more. In an earlier episode, we discussed moving our Big Data platform to the cloud. This blog is described how we move our data platform into the cloud. What tools do we need to get the data out and have all our users use it to their advantage? One of the tools is Tableau and together with our guests of the…

Python for Tools, Data Science and more

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 15-04-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: BigData DataScience software engineering python programminglanguage Tools

Let’s look at another programming language we use at bol.com: Python. At bol.com we use Python for Tools, Data Science and more. It has been around since 1991. It was created by a Dutch guy: Guido van Rossum. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability. The language’s core philosophy is summarized in the document The Zen of Python (PEP 20), which includes aphorisms such as: Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Readability counts. All well, but what…

Covid-19 Trilogy Part III – Adapting our way of working

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 8-04-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Agile skills way of working WFH Working from Home Adapt WoW

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) and adapting our way of working. So we think it’s time to spent three smaller episodes on this subject as well and share our experiences. We build up a trilogy which will cover the following subjects: Episode Office Automation: creating the prerequisites for WFH. A peek behind the screen of our Office Automation hero’s. Sharing how they prepared and showed their contribution…

Covid-19 Trilogy Part III – Adapting our way of working

Covid-19 Trilogy Part II – Season Load and season mindset

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 6-04-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Web scale Scalability Community Agile devops way of working Corona Covid-19 WFH Working from Home

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). So we think it’s time to spent three smaller episodes on this subject as well and share our experiences. We build up a trilogy which will cover the following subjects: Episode Office Automation: creating the prerequisites for WFH. A peek behind the screen of our Office Automation hero’s. Sharing how they prepared and showed their contribution in these uncertain times. Episode Season…

Covid-19 Trilogy Part II – Season Load and season mindset

Covid-19 Trilogy-part I – How Office Automation set the prerequisites for WFH

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 2-04-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: way of working Corona Covid-19 WFH Working from Home Office Automation

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). So we think it’s time to spent three smaller episodes on this subject as well and share our experiences. We build up a trilogy which will cover the following subjects: Episode Office Automation: creating the prerequisites for WFH. A peek behind the screen of our Office Automation hero’s. Sharing how they prepared and showed their contribution in these uncertain times. Episode Season…

Covid-19 Trilogy-part I – How Office Automation set the prerequisites for WFH

Chaos Engineering – every incident is a missed experiment

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 4-03-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: devops Development Engineering Culture SRE Chaos Engineering

Chaos engineering… mostly in IT we are focused on structure and order. So, what is it and what can it bring? We go over the steps: Start by defining ‘steady state’ as some measurable output of a system that indicates normal behaviour Hypothesize that this steady-state will continue in both the control group and the experimental group Introduce variables that reflect real-world events like servers that crash, hard drives that malfunction, network connections that are severed, etc. Try to disprove the hypothesis by looking for a difference in steady-state between…

Chaos Engineering – every incident is a missed experiment

Crossfit – fit for life and fit for purpose

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 27-02-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Community Coaching Crossfit Carreer

Like the Romans already said: Mens sana in corpore sano. A healthy mind in a healthy body. One sentence in an article from one of our colleagues triggered us: “Prepare for the unknown and unknowable”. We really wondered, how does this help him in his daily job? We talk about crossfit. About ring musle-up or a handstand push-up. Of course we relate it to our daily practise. How do you benefit from it in your job and even in making career decisions. We talk about the value of the community and the…

Crossfit – fit for life and fit for purpose

Utrecht JUG – Test Architectures & Hacking into Java web apps

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 19-02-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Java Testing Meetup Architecture Software devops Security Podcast JUG

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. Besides that, we discuss with one of the founders of the Utrecht JUG why it’s so great to be part of a community. He explains the great initiatives like for instance the Speaker Incubator the JUG offers. Guests…

Utrecht JUG – Test Architectures & Hacking into Java web apps

Performance testing the chat app

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 12-02-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Testing Software skills devops performance

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. Both our customers and our customer service experts couldn’t be let down. Given the short notice, we asked Ymor to help us with their knowledge and experience to perform a…

PostgreSQL – Migration and Performance

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 5-02-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: database performance PostgreSQL

This episode has 2 subjects: PostgreSQL migration and performance. The two guests of our show will present during the PostgreSQL User group meetup at bol.com which started shortly after this recording. The topic of the meetup is introduced as PG ConfEU – The Dutch talks. Guests Martijn Dashorst – a software engineer for over 20 years and has worked with various databases over the years, including DB2, Oracle, Sqlserver, SABDB and PostgreSQL. As a Java (enterprise) developer, he has worked in the education sector for over 12 years and developed…

Experimentation – it starts with courage and curiosity

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 29-01-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Agile Innovation skills Experiment Experimentation Mindset

The two guests of our show work in our experimentation team. They set a target at the beginning of 2019: Our goal is to help hundreds of people at bol.com to run experiments (more effectively). So after a year of experimenting, we are very curious about what they learned and achieved. Let’s find out! Guests Denise Visser; Product Manager and Experiment evangelist Maarten Zwart; Software Architect and data enthusiast Hosts Peter Brouwers Peter Paul van de Beek Other things We received feedback on the audio quality. Sometimes it’s hard to…

The Spaces Championship – our code competition

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 23-01-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Community game skills gamification software engineering Algorithms Problem solving

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 our big data into the cloud and we got some nice insights that we wanted to share. We asked our two guests of this episode to do so. It turned…

‘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