Utrecht JUG – Test Architectures & Hacking into Java web apps

We take a sneak peek into the Utrecht JAVA User Group (JUG) Meetup next week, February 24th. Topics will be: are End-to-End test architectures a Dead End road? And there will be some live hacking: Breaking into your Java web app. This will really give a feel for the importance of security. Besides that, we discuss with one of the founders of the Utrecht JUG why it’s so great to be part of a community. He explains the great initiatives like for instance the Speaker Incubator the JUG offers. Guests…

Utrecht JUG – Test Architectures & Hacking into Java web apps

Performance testing the chat app

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 12-02-2020
Category: Podcast Tags: Testing Software skills devops performance

With only a few weeks to go to our peak season, we wanted to ensure that the chat app on our webshop was performing up to par. An important part of our customers’ questions is answered via this chat app. You can feel the importance of it to be able to handle a load of questions during our peak season. Both our customers and our customer service experts couldn’t be let down. Given the short notice, we asked Ymor to help us with their knowledge and experience to perform a…

Advent of Code 2019

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 19-12-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Java Software skills gamification software engineering Algorithms Problem solving

The subject of this podcast episode is totally in line with the holiday season. Time for the advent calendars in many different formats. One of these formats is the Advent of Code 2019! The bol.com Tech Community is participating in this event. In this episode, we talk with 2 participants and discover what it is all about. We explore what it could do. Our software engineers see it as a good way to sharpen their problem solving and a good exercise for the upcoming bol.com spaces programming championship. Some become really competitive. Guests Erik…

Hackathon

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 27-11-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Software Innovation hackathon Robotics

The angle for this episode of our podcast is hackathons. At the time of the recording, there was one going on in our headquarters in Utrecht. What is a hackathon? Why do we organise them? And we talk about some of the initiatives at the current hackathon. The results of the hackathon were showed during the demotime a week after the hackathon. Out of the 20 projects the jury came up with a top 3 and handed over the cup. Guests Kardelen Hatun – Software engineer in the Retails Platform…

Refactoring your code

Jasper van Heijst, on 17-09-2019
Category: Blog, Architecture, Development Tags: Software Refactor

It’s common sense of course to keep your codebase clean all the time, but this isn’t always the case. It simply happens that a codebase grows in ways that were not foreseen on forehand resulting in an unclear architecture or dirty code (that must be the opposite of clean code). In this article I’d like to share our experience in dealing with such a situation, why we needed to refactor, what we did and how it improved our codebase. Why you need to refactor Modern software engineering is an agile…

Spaces Summit 2019 – Part I

Peter Paul van de Beek, Peter Brouwers, on 20-06-2019
Category: Podcast Tags: Java Event Software Community teams Spaces Summit Podcast

Three years ago a group of enthusiastic engineers gathered together during the Friday drinks. They wanted to interact more in the growing organization. Learn more from each other by sharing cool stories. The plan for a bol.com tech summit was born, they called it Spaces Summit. Three years later the 3rd edition in succession is organized by a dedicated team of committed engineers. It’s the 13th of June and the Techlab Podcast team is on the Spaces Summit location to give you an impression of the Spaces Summit. We interviewed one of the committee members to tell you the What, Why…

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.

Transparency: A holistic approach to software quality

On: 1 Nov 2018 at: bol.com
Category: Events Tags: Testing Meetup Event Software Quality transparancy

Bol.com & Xebia are happy to present to you another meetup on software quality. This time we will have Trish Khoo, keynote speaker at Agile Testing Days 2018, who will present her holistic approach to software quality.

Bol.com goes to the university of Amsterdam!

Mary Gouseti, on 12-10-2017
Category: Development, Events Tags: Software Agile Scrum Development University Amsterdam

For the last 4 years, Menno represents bol.com as a guest lecturer in one of the courses of the Software Engineering Master’s program at University of Amsterdam, this year it’s about Requirements engineering.

Bol.com goes to the university of Amsterdam!

Video: ServiceWorkers SwissKnife at Spaces Summit

Antoni Huguet Vives, on 28-09-2017
Category: Blog, Development Tags: Software Development database Front-End

A couple of months ago we organized our first internal tech conference, Spaces Summit. In the upcoming months we will post some of the talks including the video of the talk.

Software Engineering Meetup – Security

Patrick van Dissel, on 26-09-2017
Category: Security, Events Tags: Meetup Event Software Security Hackers

On Thursday the 12th of October, the meetup of Software Engineering about security will be hosted by bol.com together with Zerocopter and Flock.

Software Circus Interview – The move to the public cloud

Maarten Dirkse, on 13-09-2017
Category: Architecture, Culture, Cloud, Development Tags: Event Architecture Software Cloudbusting cloud

IT infrastructure transitions can be hard. Obviously there are technical challenges to overcome. But what do you do when internal disagreement about the way forward leads to a halt in innovation?

How structure helps me to maintain software

Oscar Westra van Holthe - Kind, on 7-02-2017
Category: Development Tags: Architecture Software Maintenance

Software maintenance can be hell. I’m sure that many developers have opened up an existing codebase, only to be greeted with a plethora of packages. You can usually see in excruciating detail the kinds of classes the software has. Any features implemented by the software are obfuscated. And once you slowly, ever so slowly, get to know the software, it gets worse: all those packages have a more or less good reason to exist. This means refactoring bit by bit (the boy scout rule) only makes the situation worse, and…

How structure helps me to maintain software