Engineering Culture – 10 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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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…

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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?…

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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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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…

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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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Introduction to our upcoming bol.com Techlab podcast episodes

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 1-05-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Development Engineering Culture Podcast Tech Community platform

“Welcome to the bol.com Tech Podcast. In this podcast we share our experience with you to learn and entertain. Peeking behind the screens of IT and Tech in general at bol.com.  Showing you our approach to IT, e-commerce and retail platforms.” This is our opening sentence of the upcoming episodes of the bol.com Tech podcast. In this introduction episode we like to share with you: What is this podcast about, why did we start it and why should you listen to it? We hope that you enjoy the podcasts as…

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Organizing your own tech conference: how cool is that?!

Frederieke Ubels, on 8-05-2018
Category: Blog, Culture, Development, Events Tags: Young Professional Event Community conference Engineering Culture

Well, pretty cool, I’d say. And even cooler if you are a young professional, fresh out of university and just started in your first job. But our pay-off is “Je kan het met bol.com” and that’s exactly how it is!

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