Our ride to peak season frontend performance

We can imagine that at a regular company your colleagues might become very nervous when you worsen the frontend performance by more than a second on the onload, just before the peak season. In this story we’d like to share our journey from experiencing a setback in performance that was caused by us innovating, to the point where we became the retailer with the second fastest frontend response times (Twinkle and Computest benchmark study) in the Netherlands. Before diving into the details, it’s worth mentioning that we as software engineers…

Prepare for the most wonderful time of the year – Season Readiness

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 16-10-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Peak Season Peak Sinterklaas Santa Claus Black Friday Singles Day Load testing SRE

In this episode we dive deeper into the IT aspects of a business topic. How to prepare for the peak load of the season – Black Friday, Sinterklaas, Christmas and even Singles Day is included. That is traditional a period where the load of basically everything increases dramatically. The slogan of the Season Readiness project that is preparing for all this is “Deliver careless holidays for our customer”. During this period every piece of the puzzle must fit. When load triples items like scaling, reliability, page load-times, predictability, up-times and…

How we deal with the unexpected

Peter Brouwers, on 8-01-2019
Category: Blog, Culture, Infrastructure Tags: IT Outage Post-Mortem Retro On Call Peak Season

“It didn’t look like a big issue at that moment”. Everybody in the room listened to what the Engineer on Duty (EoD) had to tell about the first moments what, later on, turned out to be a partly outage of the webshop in peak season.