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

By Peter Brouwers on 16-10-2019
Category: Blog, Architecture, Culture, Podcast, Infrastructure, Development, Testing 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…

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Small Web Apps

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 10-10-2019
Category: Podcast, UX 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…

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API development for the retail platform

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 3-10-2019
Category: Blog, Architecture, Podcast, Development 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…

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Redesign for the cloud – horizontal scaling

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 26-09-2019
Category: Blog, Architecture, Cloud, Podcast, Infrastructure, Development 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…

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Coaching – more impact with Human Systems Engineering

By Peter Brouwers on 11-09-2019
Category: Blog, Diversity, Culture, Podcast, Development 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…

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Measuring 2.0 – Streaming measurements

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 6-09-2019
Category: Architecture, Podcast, Development 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…

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Formule X – Accelerate your organisation

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 29-08-2019
Category: Blog, Architecture, Culture, 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…

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Interaction Design – Celebrate Failure

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 21-08-2019
Category: Podcast, Interaction Design, Interaction Design, UX 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…

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Testing in autonomous teams – speed is everything

By Peter Brouwers on 14-08-2019
Category: Culture, Cloud, Podcast, Development, Testing, Events 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…

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Cloud as Enabler to become more data driven

By Peter Brouwers on 7-08-2019
Category: Blog, Data Science & AI, Cloud, Podcast, Business Intelligence, Development 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…

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

By Peter Brouwers on 31-07-2019
Category: Architecture, Cloud, Podcast, Interaction Design, Interaction Design, Development 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…

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

By Peter Brouwers on 24-07-2019
Category: Architecture, Culture, Podcast, Development 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…

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Audiobooks – How to introduce the Netflix for reading?

By Peter Brouwers on 17-07-2019
Category: Culture, Podcast, UX, Development, Testing 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…

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

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 10-07-2019
Category: Architecture, Podcast, Development 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…

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Scary close to fully autonomous teams at Onefootball

By Peter Brouwers on 3-07-2019
Category: Diversity, Culture, Podcast, Development 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…

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Spaces Summit 2019 – Part II

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 27-06-2019
Category: Podcast, Development, Testing 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…

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Spaces Summit 2019 – Part I

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 20-06-2019
Category: Podcast, Development 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…

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Cultural Diversity – It all starts with yourself

By Peter Brouwers on 12-06-2019
Category: Diversity, Culture, 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…

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Axle the opinionated support for bol.com scrum teams

By PeterPaulvandeBeek on 6-06-2019
Category: Architecture, Podcast, Development 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…

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Performance boost the pick algorithm in the warehouse

By Peter Brouwers on 29-05-2019
Category: Data Science & AI, Cloud, Podcast, Infrastructure, Development, Testing 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…

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Improve the customer journey with Intent Recognition and Conversational Analytics

By Peter Brouwers on 23-05-2019
Category: Data Science & AI, Podcast, Development 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…

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From zero to PRO: Using GO @ bol.com

By 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…

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No more crystal ball for forecasting, data science it is

By Peter Brouwers 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…

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Our Kotlin adoption journey

By Peter Brouwers 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…

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Introduction to our upcoming bol.com Techlab podcast episodes

By Peter Brouwers on 1-05-2019
Category: Culture, Data Science & AI, Podcast, Development

“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…

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