Open source – 9 articles

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.…

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Why would you build an open source FTP server in Rust? – Podcast

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 10-07-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Web scale Open source skills cloud software engineering Software Development Rust FTP

Why build an open-source FTP server in Rust? Sometimes, I must admit I’m a little dazzled by all the languages, frameworks and stuff our engineers work with. So, when our guest of today explained to me some of the intriguing aspects of the language we will be discussing in this episode I had to stretch my mind a little. I managed and could follow his explanation. And I found a great topic for this podcast. In the episode, we explore the Rust programming language and our first open-source code in…

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Turning rusty tech into Rust ~ When you need to FTP but don’t want to

Hannes de Jager, on 17-06-2021
Category: Development Tags: Open source Rust FTP

I believe that FTP is due for a makeover because it’s so ancient that few companies want to host it, yet so many customers still want to use it. That’s why fellow techies and I embarked on two open-source projects to develop a modernised FTP server for the cloud called unFTP. In this writeup I tell you about this server and library, how you can use, customise and extend it and finally ask you to help us make it even better by contributing to its Rust codebases. unFTP you say…?…

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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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From zero to PRO: Using GO @ bol.com

Peter Brouwers, on 7-05-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Open source Golang go Development cloud software engineering Podcast

In this episode we talk about GO. Go is not a language that is used the most at bol.com. That’s is Java, together with Kotlin. In 2014 it was introduced for the first time and reached a steady but not so big user group. Recently, along with the move to the cloud, we experience a second wave of adoption. When you listen to the stories our two enthusiastic guests share in this episode, you might even believe Go is the future. Guests Rogier Lommers Tom Stoepker Hosts Peter Brouwers Peter…

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Finding the longest matching string prefix … fast

Niels Basjes, on 10-12-2018
Category: Data Science & AI, Development Tags: Java Software Open source DataScience Algorithms

In many systems at bol.com the response speed of our systems is very important. This blog is about the data structures and algorithms we used to make a specific analysis step a lot faster: Finding the longest matching string prefix.

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How (not) to sink a data stream to files? Journeys from Kafka to Parquet.

Gabor Hermann, on 30-07-2018
Category: Development Tags: Java Scalability BigData Open source distributed

Last year the Measuring 2.0 team at bol.com has started measuring user behavior on the bol.com website. Of course, we wanted to make the data widely accessible within the whole organization.

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Making sense of the user agent string

Niels Basjes, on 30-03-2017
Category: Development Tags: Java Open source UX DataScience

Ever since I’ve started working for a WebAnalytics company in 2005 I’ve been working on problems related to making sense of web data. One of the most difficult elements in this type of analysis is making sense of the user agent.
Very often the raw web data I work with is stored in Apache HTTPD access log files that have been compressed using gzip.

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GOTO Amsterdam 2017

On: 14 Jun 2017 at: Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam
Category: Events Tags: Microservices Open source Hystrix Resilience

Attend “Resilience engineering in a microservice landscape” by Maurice Zeijen to learn how we at bol.com achieve fault tolerance.

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