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…

Redesign for the cloud – horizontal scaling

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 26-09-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Architecture Scalability cloud Podcast redesign

We think “the Cloud” is to broad a subject to handle in one episode of the podcast. That is why we break down our cloud journey in small pieces and go over them in separate episodes. This time we dive into “Redesign for the cloud – horizontal scaling”. In an earlier episode we discussed how we moved our Big Data to the Cloud, in the Cloud as an enabler to becoming more data-driven. When moving applications and services to the Cloud we think about redesigning them, like in this case…

Redesign for the cloud – horizontal scaling

Measuring 2.0 – Streaming measurements

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 6-09-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Web scale Architecture Scalability BigData data Podcast Conversational Measuring recommendations personalization

The big question in this episode is “How can we create 10 million personalized webshops? Tailormade for every one of our customers so it suites their needs best?” In short, the answering is Measuring 2.0. This enables us to measure more accurately how customers are behaving in our webshop. This enables to give them a more personalized experience. We are aiming for a feedback loop of 1 second. So 1 second after and action was performed by a customer in our webshop the data is available for service that handles personalization and recommendations. These…

Agile at Scale – Reality is complex, don’t expect simple solutions

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 24-07-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Web scale Scalability Agile Scrum Podcast Product teams Agile@scale Flight level Business Agility

Agile at Scale. Ever since we started our journey into Agile and scrum, we have been wondering whether we were on the right path for business and IT agility. Way back when we were with 7 scrum teams scaling wasn’t the most important issue. With our growth came challenges for scaling our agile way of working. We have been on a few plateaus where we were searching for the next step, as have been other companies on the same venture. Today we talk about some of the things we learned…

Agile at Scale – Reality is complex, don’t expect simple solutions

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.

SWAPs: From monolith to small web applications

Elinor Bakker, on 19-06-2018
Category: Architecture, UX, Development Tags: Architecture Microservices Scalability UX Partners bol.com devops YBIYRIYLI

Web applications usually start small and loveable, but gradually become larger and larger as more people work on them and front-end technologies move on. If you’re not careful they can potentially end up as the one thing no-one wants to touch anymore and cause a lot of frustrations for agile teams and business innovators alike.

Services & Autonomy: the one can’t live without the other

Frederieke Ubels, on 20-07-2017
Category: Development Tags: Architecture Microservices Scalability devops Autonomy

What started out as a means of technical scalability turned out to be the most important driver of team autonomy – and vice versa. This is our story of Backspin, Rabbits and the Man on the Moon.

Big, bigger, scalable

Niels Basjes, on 22-03-2017
Category: Architecture, Development Tags: Scalability BigData

At bol.com we service millions of products to millions of customers, resulting in billions of pages each year. We want to create the most effective service to our visitors we possibly can. So we spent a lot of time preparing the content, monitoring the systems and analyzing how we can support our customers better in finding what they really want.

Nextbuild 2017

On: 20 May 2017 at: High Tech Campus Eindhoven
Category: Events Tags: Event Scalability BigData

On The NextBuild Conference I will host a talk about Designing scalable data intensive applications. At bol.com the datavolumes we need to process exceed the capacity of any single computer. As a consequence we are forced to think about designing our data intensive applications in such a way that they can be run on a cluster of systems and grow to handle much more that the volumes of today. In this talk I will show the main design concepts that bol.com has been using for more than 8 years that are needed to…