software engineering – 19 articles

The Programmer’s Brain – podcast

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 7-10-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: skills software engineering clean code Books

Some aspects of software engineering are easily overlooked. In the book The Programmer’s Brain some of these like reading code, thinking about code and collaborating on code are at the centre. In this episode, we talk to the author of this book to guide us through these aspects. To improve your coding skills it is good to know how your brain works. That will enable you to set your brain to work for you. If you spent significantly more time on reading code than on writing code, shouldn’t we focus…

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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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Father & Son into IT – Podcast

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 16-04-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Security software engineering internship

Every time I look at you. I see myself. I’m so proud of you. For you help make me what I am. A better man. I’m just so proud of you. ~ Lyrics by Alain Clark A special episode comes with a special opening. In February we had an extraordinary occasion during our onboarding. Father and Son in the same ‘virtual room. Father started as Software Engineer in the bol.com security department and son started as… Software Engineer in the security department, doing his final intern assignment. We have got…

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TypeScript, where we love strict

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 22-01-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Development Front-End software engineering JavaScript programminglanguage Typescript

Introduction It sparked in the episode Interactive heavy applications we should record a podcast episode on TypeScript. Around the same time, we came in contact with Hackages. A company focusing on learning tech. Time to bring the engineers together and dive deeper into TypeScript. Typescript is mentioned amongst the 5 most promising languages in 2020. We talk about: What is typescript and how do you benefit? What are good implementation strategies? Bol.com examples Examples from Hackages Maturity in the usage of Typescript Guests Niels van Midden; Front End software engineer…

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GraphQL – start but start small

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 13-01-2021
Category: Podcast Tags: Development software engineering API GraphQL Rest Definition

Introduction We want to share our approach to IT to learn and entertain you. In this episode, we are happy to have an external guest at the table discussing with our internal guest. GraphQL stands for Graph Query Language and is used for interacting with services from the frontend. We are talking about API’s here. Explore with us the possibilities this approach has to offer and how it could even help you to speeds up innovation in the front-end. Like our guest mentions: GraphQL is a specification not an implementation…

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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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Sociotechnical Architecture to maximize impact

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 24-09-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Innovation teams software engineering customer centric Sociotechnical Architecture Software Architect velocity

In this episode, we touch a field that we don’t explore that much, Architecture. To be more precise: Sociotechnical Architecture to maximize impact. In a way, it’s strange since Peter Paul has worked as an architect for quite a while. On the website of our guest, esilva.net,  it’s called “co-design organizational and technical systems to maximize impact”.  We think there is so much to explore in these words Sociotechnical Architecture so we asked Eduardo to join this show. <picture source> We discuss what it is and also, why it is…

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Python for Tools, Data Science and more

Peter Brouwers, Peter Paul van de Beek, on 15-04-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: BigData DataScience software engineering python programminglanguage Tools

Let’s look at another programming language we use at bol.com: Python. At bol.com we use Python for Tools, Data Science and more. It has been around since 1991. It was created by a Dutch guy: Guido van Rossum. Its design philosophy emphasizes code readability. The language’s core philosophy is summarized in the document The Zen of Python (PEP 20), which includes aphorisms such as: Beautiful is better than ugly. Explicit is better than implicit. Simple is better than complex. Complex is better than complicated. Readability counts. All well, but what…

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The Spaces Championship – our code competition

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 23-01-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Community game skills gamification software engineering Algorithms Problem solving

It was briefly mentioned in our episode on Advent of Code. We also started an internal Coding Championship. Spaces Championship. Let’s dive into this and find out what it is all about.  From our personal experience, we know that is easier to train and improve when we are in a competition. Could it be that the same mechanism is here at work too? Let us know when you think we should open-up this competition externally as well, goto Linkedin, mailto: techlab@bol.com or twitter us: @bol_com_Techlab Guests Harmen Prins – Software…

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