Engineering Culture – 14 articles

How could this happen – podcast

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 19-11-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Web scale Scalability Resilience devops Engineering Culture Peak Season Learn incident

If you are a regular listener to the podcast or an e-commerce watcher, you know “the season” is very important for us. It is a yearly recurring theme in the podcast. You are probably also aware that uptime and responsiveness of our app and website are crucial. And you might have noticed that enabling our software engineers to perform at their peak is very important for us. Enabling teams and engineers is what we do to build a great place to engineer. And sometimes things just go sour. A perfect…

Read more

Engineering Productivity and Backstage – Podcast

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 23-08-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Open source Innovation skills software engineering Engineering Culture Engineering Productivity Backstage

Engineering Productivity With the growth of our engineering community, the need for more focus on engineering productivity is clear. We invited two experts to discuss this topic with us. We actually got to this point when one of our listeners pointed out one of the products we are using for this and how awesome a topic that would be for our podcast. Backstage The product he was referring to, is Backstage. Backstage is a platform for developer portals that is used as an app store for tools for software engineers.…

Read more

The Podcast Guest – Podcast

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 1-07-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: skills teams Engineering Culture Tech Community

Who is the Podcast Guest? This will be a bonus episode. Maybe not that tech-related but instead you will listen to a very energetic, passionate and inspiring person: The Podcast Guest. Who knows a lot about asking the right questions and working in teams. And following one of the topics of our last episode, a lot of curiosity is involved. We invited the Podcast Guest (de podcastgast), or actually, he invited himself… His goal is to join 100 different podcasts in 2021. And he is very enthusiastic about his goal.…

Read more

The 5th anniversary of the Spaces Summit – Podcast

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 27-05-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Conferences Culture Engineering Culture Summit Spaces Summit

From how it was born to what it is now in 45 minutes One of the things that make us really proud about working in Tech at bol.com is our annual Space Summit. Our internal tech conference by developers for developers. And maybe you can recall we had quite some interesting episodes, blogs and videos about it and some of the talks given there in the last 2 years. This year is a special edition! We celebrate our 5th anniversary!! In June 2018 Peter published an article on Linkedin with…

Read more

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…

Read more

Software engineers on Duty – so you sleep well at night

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 31-03-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Agile Innovation devops Engineering Culture Operations Site Reliability Engineering on duty

The why and what of our Software engineers on Duty Let’s be honest about this, nobody likes to be woken up at night to react to an alert whether it’s a text- or whatsapp message, (automated) phone call or traditional pager. But every company taking his 24/7 run seriously has to organize their on call duty in a scalable and sustainable way. Initially bol.com organized it in a traditional way, meaning a team of system engineers with different specialism took care of the duty. Only a couple of years ago…

Read more

What you should know building a Tech Lead community – Podcast

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 26-03-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Engineering Culture Tech Lead

Don’t miss our story of the introduction of the Tech Leads During the podcast, you will find out what Tech Leads are and why we need to build this community of Tech Leads at bol.com. You will learn how we approached this and avoid hiding the Tech Leads in ivory towers. The two tech leads and an IT director share best practices and pitfalls (and what we learned from them). The Why and What of our Tech Lead Community Tech Lead Community Why did we start to define the role?…

Read more

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…

Read more

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…

Read more

Chaos Engineering – every incident is a missed experiment

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 4-03-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: devops Development Engineering Culture SRE Chaos Engineering

Chaos engineering… mostly in IT we are focused on structure and order. So, what is it and what can it bring? We go over the steps: Start by defining ‘steady state’ as some measurable output of a system that indicates normal behaviour Hypothesize that this steady-state will continue in both the control group and the experimental group Introduce variables that reflect real-world events like servers that crash, hard drives that malfunction, network connections that are severed, etc. Try to disprove the hypothesis by looking for a difference in steady-state between…

Read more