TechLab by Bol

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. What this episode covers That will enable yo...

Imagine you want to buy something. You go to bol.com and you start typing the article in the search bar. Automatically you will be served suggestions and as a result, you want a limited number of articles from our 30 million products catalogue. What this episode covers You select the product you want, press the buy button and there it is, at your doorstep at the selected moment. Sounds simple, rig...

In early April the latest version of our Retailer API was launched. Given the importance of the API for almost 15.000 partners this was again a major step. Over the years the retailer API became the heart and soul of our ecosystem. What this episode covers But this path wasn't always that obvious. It took vision, decisiveness and perseverance to get this far. In this episode, we explore this...

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 Ba...

How interaction resulted in a guest appearance “We like interactions and feedback”, that’s what we say in our outro. The guest of our show reacted to one of our podcasts earlier this year. We reached out to him and invited him to the podcast. What this episode covers Why? Because it’s good to look in the mirror. Check our stories with the outside in view. And that’s exactly what we are going to do...

How Data Science supports us to predict the unpredictable Just like for any store, forecasting is an important tool to support the business and its profitability. At bol.com we have worked on several major iterations of our forecast. One of the hosts worked on a large leap in forecast performance over 8 years ago. You can check some another leap we have made while listening to our podcast episode...

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. What this episode covers And I fou...

Who is the Podcast . Guests ? This will be a bonus episode. Maybe not that tech-related but instead you will listen to a very energetic, passionate and inspiring person: The Podcast Notes

What is the key competence of our business analysts (BA) We talked about domain knowledge, tech affinity and building bridges between stakeholders and software engineers. Sometimes the business analyst is almost seen as a project manager. Aligning with product owners is key in this role. What this episode covers Every business analysts within bol.com fills in this role differently but about one th...

Next level leveraging cloud computing We moved 70% of our services to the cloud and new services start in the cloud unless... Time to dive into a topic brought up by our tech leads. Want to know how you can maximize your cloud benefits? Alexandra wrote a blog post on Horizontal Pod Auto-scaling, HPA. What this episode covers It triggered us for this episode. Maximizing cloud benefits can be done i...

Writing an article is reflection, publishing it is getting feedback Learning from our colleagues. That is important to us. So, we were delighted when we found another great piece of this on LinkedIn, Elinore shared. to inspire others who are thinking of transitioning from tech into a leadership role or are just curious about my experiences and thoughts. The transition from tech into a leadership r...

From how it was born to what it is now in 45 minutes One of the things that make us really proud about working in Tech at bol.com is our annual Space Summit. Our internal tech conference by developers for developers. And maybe you can recall we had quite some interesting episodes, blogs and videos about it and some of the talks given there in the last 2 years. This year is a special edition! We ce...

Data Maturity Model as common ground, Data Literacy Model to measure the level of speaking, writing and reading data To state as a company we want to become more data-driven is the first step. To truly understand what this means and define a common ground to discuss the progress is the second. Back in the eighties, the Capability Maturity Model was defined to develop and refine software developmen...

Supporting products with KPI's and OKR's We had previous episodes on how bol.com is moving to a product organization. In this one, we’ll dive into how to measure the success of these products and set objectives for them. Including measuring whether we are getting the desired results. What this episode covers Being the data-driven company that we want to be we asked our data people to hel...

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. What this episode covers Father and Son in the same 'virtual room. Father started as Software Engineer in the bol...

The why and what of our Software engineers on Duty Let's be honest about this, nobody likes to be woken up at night to react to an alert whether it's a text- or whatsapp message, (automated) phone call or traditional pager. But every company taking his 24/7 run seriously has to organize their on call duty in a scalable and sustainable way. Initially bol.com organized it in a traditional...

Don't miss our story of the introduction of the Tech Leads During the podcast, you will find out what Tech Leads are and why we need to build this community of Tech Leads at bol.com. You will learn how we approached this and avoid hiding the Tech Leads in ivory towers. The two tech leads and an IT director share best practices and pitfalls (and what we learned from them). The Why and What of...

Introduction Peter is very honest in this episode (the stage is not the place he is really comfortable at) and Peter Paul is sharing his first experience with Improv (is it a small trauma Peter Paul?). So time to talk about Improv, Improvisation Theatre and applied Improv because we do want to learn about it and we are really curious how this relates to our Tech Community. Our guest Burgert prepar...

Introduction In July 2019 we had our first podcast episode on voice and Google Assistant. Back then Marieke and Marvin introduced us to the future of interaction by voice. In this episode, we dive into the potential of brand recognition. Many people in The Netherlands will recognize the voice we use in our commercials on radio, television and social media as the voice of bol.com. What this episode...

Introduction Another week another book discussion. Maybe we can start a second Techlab Podcast dedicated to interesting books? We got some great responses on the last week’s episode about team topologies and we had a good opportunity. So it is time for the Never Split the Difference - Podcast. In earlier episodes, we talked with YP’s about their side projects (behind the mask - platform for the ho...

Introduction A lot of people involved in the design and structuring of organizations could learn a lot from the book Team Topologies. Our guest describes it in the episode a Domain Specific Language (DSL) for organizational design and evolution. The header of the website and the subtitle of the suggest that it is the way for organizing business and technology teams for fast flow. In the episode, w...

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. What this episode covers 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...

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. What this episode covers Explore with us the possibilities this approach has to...

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. What this episode covers 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 conte...

Introduction It happens a lot that listening to a podcast sparks new questions. So, after our episode on Front-End quality, we wanted to know more about Storybook. This coincided with some people reaching out to us to collaborate in the podcast. What this episode covers And look where we are now: creating a new podcast on this subject. We asked our selves the question: Could it be the holy grail f...