TechLab by Bol

Introduction Weaving a Service Mesh for Multiple Clusters at bol.com - that was the title for the presentation our guests gave during the virtual KubeCon and CloudNativeCon 2020 earlier this year. This triggered our curiosity. We have questions like what is this service mesh about? Why do we need it? How did we implement it?. Guests Remco Overdijk ; Tech Lead Provisioning Fleet / Expert System Eng...

Introduction One of the purposes of this podcast is to share our unique bol.com culture with you. Traditions play an important part in culture. So, in this episode, we share a view on the evolution of a tradition. What this episode covers A tradition that underlines our focus on data. In this sales season, everybody in bol.com wants to know how we are doing, preferably Real-Time. With the latest v...

Introduction In this episode we are sharing something that is unique at least in the Tech Community here at bol.com. To become official F/OSS committer and eventually PMC member. Without spoiling too much, I think this contribution will make a positive impact far beyond the bol.com Tech landscape and serve in an enormous number of companies. Helping engineers all over the planet. What this episode...

Introduction Even if it doesn't appeal to you, you might want to think about it when you work in a larger microservice landscape or have a serious big data platform...Proof data consistency in a microservice landscape. When we google this subject I already get 1.2 MLN results so there’s something going on here. To ensure data consistency several practices are available: Saga Pattern Reconcili...

Introduction In this episode, we show a little of our front-end love. And our love for testing and enjoying the quality of a good front-end. It was time for that because the last time we talked about front end related stuff was quit some episodes ago. What this episode covers We are going to talk about Front End Quality in an interactive-heavy application. First, we discuss two statements/dilemmas...

Today we take a look behind the mask. The moment we recorded this podcast episode the 2nd wave of Corona is hitting The Netherlands. In the first wave, the Corona crisis was causing a lot of pressure and stress on our healthcare system and nurses & caretakers specifically. With a couple of IT Young Professionals, we are helping a great project called “Behind The Mask”. It is a joint effort of...

"This is how we do IT", is the slogan of our Techlab site and podcast. Every now and then we reach out to external guests to learn from them and exchange ideas. We are really happy to have this external guest in our show to talk about "Let's get ethical". What this episode covers This multi-talent released her book ‘ De bubbel ’ mid 2019 after 15 years at Google, Spotify a...

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. What this episode covers On the website of our guest, esilva.net , it's called “co-design organizational and technical systems to maximize impact”. We thin...

Bonjour ! Félicitations messieurs, il y a seulement deux semaines, que le bol.com application multilingue est disponible dans les app-stores. That's how we started this episode. Congratulate our guests with the launch of the multilingual bol.com app. It was launched in the French-speaking part of Belgium, Wallonia. What this episode covers With this launch, over 5 million French-speaking Belg...

Site Reliability Engineering, or SRE, is seen by a lot of people as the next logical step in developing DevOps capabilities. SRE takes concepts from software engineering and puts them to use in an operations context. Over the last 3 years, we have been experimenting with SRE approaches and gradually integrating them into our DevOps way of working. What this episode covers In this episode, we share...

Welcome back after the summer holidays! Hope you were able to enjoy an awesome break. We took some time to prepare some great podcast episodes for you. Holidays, always a nice moment to reflect on things. One of the things might be your personal development and productivity. What this episode covers Saying yes to too many things, do these things add to my personal development, how do you keep trac...

In this episode, we take another look, a fresh perspective on Data Science for Logistics. In earlier episodes, we talked about related topics like Forecasting and crafting a Picking Algorithm using Data Science. With the guests of this episode, we dive into two specific challenges in the warehousing domain, the cost-based selection is the first one and the second is put-away with simulation as the...

We changed roles for this unique episode. And why is that? We are going to look back on the first 55 episodes. So, Peter Paul and Peter will be the guests of this show and Niels Kuiper and Bruno Lauwers will be your host. Our motto is 'sharing is caring'. What this episode covers So, practise what you preach and share the podcast journey as well. That was what we had in mind. We share ho...

When it comes to developing software we use the adagio: You built it, You run it, You love it. Same should hold for all the -ilities or non-functional requirements. So, one should love their logging. One of the subjects that we did not really touch yet in our podcast is non-functionals. What this episode covers Today we take a closer look at logging. An aspect that typically fills some of the non-...

Today we explore our product architecture. We have been talking with Jim van de Waal about product organizations. We spoke to our Agile at Scale friends about product organisations and Agile at Scale. Now it is time to talk about the foundation to build these on. What this episode covers We call this the product architecture. We believe that a lot of companies are in the same transformation. Years...

Update 11th march 2021 This week started with the International Womens Day. #ChooseToChallenge #IWD2021 We wanted to start a new experiment so that's why we started the experiment with this episode. We want to add automated transcription to our posts. Podcasts are a great way to share knowledge but unfortunately people who are deaf or hearing impaired are excluded. What this episode covers Th...

Ever since we recorded the podcast about Agile @ Scale, we wanted some of the people involved again in our show. We care about the topic. Think there is a lot to tell and learn. What this episode covers And it is of interest to a lot of our listeners. That is why at least we think it is awesome that this episode is about Innovation Rhythm - How to drink less coffee and achieve more. In the first A...

Almost a year ago we spoke to Jim van der Waal, a former colleague and now working as a Product Manager at OneFootball. Back then he had just delivered his presentation: “Scary close to autonomous teams” during the Spaces Summit 2019. Recently Jim posted a range of blog posts, with topics like: Product Owner vs. Product Manager: what is the difference? Making SLO’s fast Product Teams: striving for...

In this episode, we are exploring a topic that is definitely work-related but not that tech-related: Dealing with stress in the tech sector. At bol.com we have at least twice a year an employee engagement survey. Some of the questions are about how the workload is perceived. What this episode covers If you look at the results they differ per domain. So, context is very important. As is being press...

Spaces Summit in corona time means Spaces Summit goes virtual. Maybe you remember from last year that we have an annual internal tech conference at bol.com. Given the measures, in place, we can’t come together. What this episode covers So, we go for a digital online equivalent. We wanted to know what it takes to organise an event like this? But we found out there's an even more important step...

The topic of this show is exactly why we like to be the hosts of this podcast. We learn a lot about all areas in our business. In this show, we dive into the marketing domain. What this episode covers We will learn about models like multi-touch, lift studies, time decay, and more. We talk about Data Science for Marketing Attribution. Put simply, marketing attribution is the analytical science of d...

Turning to business analytics this episode, we discover it’s a broad field. Business Intelligence hasn't been discussed that much yet in our podcast. So, we are excited to learn more. What this episode covers In an earlier episode , we discussed moving our Big Data platform to the cloud. T his blog is described how we move our data platform into the cloud. What tools do we need to get the dat...

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. What this episode covers 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 aphor...

Covid-19 rules the world, so it determines the subjects for our podcast. Just like others, we moved from studio recording to home recording. Basically working from home (WFH) and adapting our way of working. What this episode covers So we think it’s time to spent three smaller episodes on this subject as well and share our experiences. We build up a trilogy which will cover the following subjects:...

Covid-19 rules the world, so it determines the subjects for our podcast. Just like others, we moved from studio recording to home recording. Basically working from home (WFH). What this episode covers So we think it’s time to spent three smaller episodes on this subject as well and share our experiences. We build up a trilogy which will cover the following subjects: Episode Office Automation : cre...