Culture – 15 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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Applied Improv in Business

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 2-03-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Culture Engineering Culture way of working improv applied improv

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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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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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

Update 11th march 2021 This week started with the International Womens Day. #ChooseToChallenge #IWD2021 We wanted to start a new experiment so that’s why we started the experiment with this episode. We want to add automated transcription to our posts. Podcasts are a great way to share knowledge but unfortunately people who are deaf or hearing impaired are excluded. That is not what we want. Introduction 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…

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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.…

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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…

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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…

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