The state of Reactive Streams

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…

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

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…

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

Stop Smashing your Keyboard! Zoom out! Think!

Eduardo da Silva, on 14-12-2018
Category: Architecture, Culture, Development, Events Tags: Architecture Development Culture Design

TL;DR: this article discusses in detail my presentation at Spaces Summit 2018. I talked about the need to stop smashing our keyboards and “blindly” focus on “high-speed”, and start thinking about what we are doing, why and how we are doing it.

SWAPs: From monolith to small web applications

Elinor Bakker, on 19-06-2018
Category: Architecture, UX, Development Tags: Architecture Microservices Scalability UX Partners bol.com devops YBIYRIYLI

Web applications usually start small and loveable, but gradually become larger and larger as more people work on them and front-end technologies move on. If you’re not careful they can potentially end up as the one thing no-one wants to touch anymore and cause a lot of frustrations for agile teams and business innovators alike.

Video: Insights- Building a Boomerang that doesn’t come back (to haunt you) at Spaces Summit

Mattijs Meiboom, on 15-12-2017
Category: Blog, Architecture, Culture, Development Tags: Testing Architecture Microservices Concepts Change Risks

“My past year as a software engineer at bol.com has mostly been dedicated to breaking down one of the big monoliths within our software landscape into smaller services. To be more specific: I’ve been working in a team to extract the processes related to customer returns into a separate microservice.”

Software Circus Interview – The move to the public cloud

Maarten Dirkse, on 13-09-2017
Category: Architecture, Culture, Cloud, Development Tags: Event Architecture Software Cloudbusting cloud

IT infrastructure transitions can be hard. Obviously there are technical challenges to overcome. But what do you do when internal disagreement about the way forward leads to a halt in innovation?

Services & Autonomy: the one can’t live without the other

Frederieke Ubels, on 20-07-2017
Category: Development Tags: Architecture Microservices Scalability devops Autonomy

What started out as a means of technical scalability turned out to be the most important driver of team autonomy – and vice versa. This is our story of Backspin, Rabbits and the Man on the Moon.

How CQRS got our web scale groove back

Peter Paul van de Beek, on 21-06-2017
Category: Blog, Architecture, Development Tags: CQRS Web scale Architecture patterns scale

In this posts, we’ll show you how we use the CQRS “web scale” pattern to achieve scalability and flexibility in our back office software. This is needed as we rely heavily on our back office to offer our customers the best available service.

From database killer to top performer!

Nick Tinnemeier, on 12-06-2017
Category: Blog, Culture, Development Tags: Architecture Microservices database Grafana

How do you get the IT management board to serve you coffee on a golden platter? You have to do something good of course, exceptional in fact. In order to tell you how we became top performer instead of database killer by creative use of a cache, we will have to take you back to December 2015, when it all started.

How structure helps me to maintain software

Oscar Westra van Holthe - Kind, on 7-02-2017
Category: Development Tags: Architecture Software Maintenance

Software maintenance can be hell. I’m sure that many developers have opened up an existing codebase, only to be greeted with a plethora of packages. You can usually see in excruciating detail the kinds of classes the software has. Any features implemented by the software are obfuscated. And once you slowly, ever so slowly, get to know the software, it gets worse: all those packages have a more or less good reason to exist. This means refactoring bit by bit (the boy scout rule) only makes the situation worse, and…

How structure helps me to maintain software

Codemotion 2017

On: 17 May 2017 at: Kromhouthal, Amsterdam
Category: Events Tags: Event CQRS Architecture Microservices

Applying “web scale” patterns in the bol.com back office Peter Paul van de Beek (IT Architect at bol.com) will show you in this session how we use “web scale” patterns to achieve scalability and flexibility in our back-office software. We will guide you through how we apply patterns like CQRS, event sourcing and micro services to solve puzzles in our back-office services. Interesting is that in our experience we don’t need these just to solve technical problems, they also help us solve some of our business problems! Sign up for…