BAPC2020 – Olympic spirit or serious business?

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…

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

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…

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…

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

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…

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…

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.

Video: How does IT work?

Menno Vis, on 16-12-2017
Category: Culture, Development Tags: Agile Scrum Culture Autonomy Video

Over 1200 people work at bol.com and our IT department consists of more than 350 engineers, clustered into 60 cross-functional teams. These teams are all grouped in fleets and spaces. Staying organized at this scale is definitely a challenge. To make this happen, we optimize for autonomy, mastery, purpose and ownership

Our agile journey so far – Part 5: Sustaining the change

Menno Vis, on 1-11-2017
Category: Blog, Culture, Development Tags: Agile Scrum devops Culture leadership

This is the fifth and last post about our growth story. You’ve read about the history of bol.com and the process they made to reach their goal: landing on the moon. Now we’ve come to the final chapter.

Our agile journey so far – Part 5: Sustaining the change

The Dutch Software Testing Championship

Lucas Verberne, on 24-07-2017
Category: Testing Tags: Testing Community Culture

After the success of Software Testing World Cup last year, the winning team thought a Dutch version would also be interesting. Co-organized and hosted by Dutch Software Testing Association TestNet, the championship took place on May 1st.

Japanese cucumbers, boomerangs and utopias

Roy Jacobs, on 23-06-2017
Category: Culture, Development, Events Tags: Conferences Engineering Fun Culture

bol.com has two speeds of operation: “very fast” and “extremely fast”. In this whirlwind it can sometimes be difficult for teams to share knowledge or just talk about things they find interesting. A handful of colleagues decided something needed to be done about this. What better way, they thought, than to just organize an entire conference by themselves?