Community – 14 articles

Building an Engineering Culture

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 8-04-2021
Category: Blog, Development Tags: Community Agile Innovation skills Culture Video Engineering Culture Diversity

In the bol.com Tech Community, we get quite some questions on how we build a great engineering culture. Mid-March 2021 the hosts of our podcast joined the Hackages podcast which was live recorded with almost 100 attendees. They shared their experiences and answered many questions from the audience. Hackages is a community based platform to help developers and businesses grow and empower each other through content, training and consultancy services In bol.com we believe that autonomy of the teams brings the creativity, knowledge and craftmanship needed to build the leading…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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.…

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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…

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