TechLab by Bol

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: crea...

Chaos engineering... mostly in IT we are focused on structure and order. So, what is it and what can it bring? We go over the steps: Start by defining ‘steady state’ as some measurable output of a system that indicates normal behaviour Hypothesize that this steady-state will continue in both the control group and the experimental group Introduce variables that reflect real-world events like server...

Like the Romans already said: Mens sana in corpore sano. A healthy mind in a healthy body. One sentence in an article from one of our colleagues triggered us: "Prepare for the unknown and unknowable". We really wondered, how does this help him in his daily job? We talk about crossfit. What this episode covers About ring musle-up  or a  handstand push-up. Of course we relate it to our dai...

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. What this episode covers Besides that, we discuss with one of the founders of the Utrecht JUG why it's s...

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. What this episode covers Both our customers and our customer service experts couldn't b...

This episode has 2 subjects: PostgreSQL migration and performance. The two guests of our show will present during the PostgreSQL User group meetup at bol.com which started shortly after this recording. The topic of the meetup is introduced as PG ConfEU - The Dutch talks.. Guests Martijn Dashorst – a software engineer for over 20 years and has worked with various databases over the years, including...

The two guests of our show work in our experimentation team. They set a target at the beginning of 2019: Our goal is to help hundreds of people at bol.com to run experiments (more effectively). So after a year of experimenting, we are very curious about what they learned and achieved. What this episode covers Let’s find out! Guests Denise Visser ; Product Manager and Experiment evangelist Maarten...

It was briefly mentioned in our episode on Advent of Code. We also started an internal Coding Championship. Spaces Championship. What this episode covers 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...

In this episode, we talk to Marieke and Tadeusz since we were intrigued by the title of their meetup presentation: Everybody is a UX Researcher. Since we didn't consider ourselves a UX Researcher before we wanted to know more about the subject. And we wanted to find out if being a UX Researcher could also improve our daily professional lives. What this episode covers And in the end, we actual...

A group of Kotlin enthusiast joined KotlinConf back in December last year in Copenhagen. We invited this group to share their learnings for this conference. Two of the participants are sharing their takeaways from KotlinConf with you. Our first podcast was about the adoption of Kotlin at bol.com. What this episode covers Hope you will also enjoy this episode and our second season. Guests Cas Platt...

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. What this episode covers In this episode, we talk with 2 participants and discover what it is all about. We explore what it could do. Our software engineer...

One of the aspects that keep popping up in software development: Technical Debt. Some created on purpose, for example, to get features into production fast. Some just came into existence... So, what is Technical Debt? And how to fight it. According to the definition* it can be compared to monetary debt. What this episode covers If technical debt is not repaid, it can accumulate 'interest&#x27...

How we tame Google Cloud resources with R2D2. We had some episodes on the cloud already. Now it’s time to discuss how bol.com combines the promises of the cloud and their requirements for Reproducibility and Reliability. What this episode covers For instance, balance infinite resources and ultimate autonomy with security. Within bol.com we developed R2D2. R2D2 stands for our Reproducible Resource...

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. What this episode covers Out of the 20 projects the jur...

In this episode, we talk about growing talent. We dive into how we approach this as bol.com in our Young Professional Program. Also called YPs. What this episode covers On our recruitment web site, we call this “the IT journey of a lifetime”. Is that just marketing or is there more to it? Guests Bojan Filipovic ; software engineer in team Bond, in the content fleet. Just graduated from the young p...

The state of Reactive Streams - watch the presentation and listen to the podcast. International Keynote speaker Oleh Dokuka gave a presentation on the state of Reactive Streams at bol.com. We took advantage of this opportunity and interviewed him for the podcast. What this episode covers The Reactive Streams specification is state of the art for asynchronous, non-blocking data streams with the fin...

This episode is on women in tech. Our guests are two speakers at the upcoming European Women in Tech Conference later this month in Amsterdam. To be honest, if we look at the hosts of this podcast and if we look at our guest list of the past episodes... What this episode covers It is still a subject that requires attention. In an earlier episode we talked about diversity in terms of cultural aspec...

In this episode, we talk about User Interfaces (UI) and User Experience(UX). Since this is a very visible topic, everybody has an opinion on it. Even though I’m not working on our webshop I get unsolicited feedback on a regular basis. Where a lot of the UX Design discussion focuses on our webshop. What this episode covers We choose another focus for this episode. The UI that is not common to most...

In this episode, we talk about a way to be inspired and inspiring others, learn from each other and grow your network: Conferences! And more in detail our colleague's road to Devoxx Belgium 2019. At bol.com we are challenged to present our stories inside and outside bol.com. Inside bol.com we have our great Spaces Summit and meetups, Outside we speak at several conferences. That seems more ch...

In this episode we dive deeper into the IT aspects of a business topic. How to prepare for the peak load of the season – Black Friday, Sinterklaas, Christmas and even Singles Day is included. That is traditional a period where the load of basically everything increases dramatically. What this episode covers The slogan of the Season Readiness project that is preparing for all this is “Deliver carel...

Our Small Web Apps or SWAPs, in short, are something like the SOA for Front-End. We aim for separate deployable parts of the Front-End we have available for our Plaza partners, suppliers and internal users. In the Front-End we also encountered that we had teams waiting for each other before they could bring functionality to Pro. Basically, because the Front-End became a monolith. Besides that, peo...

In this episode of the podcast, we talk about API development for the retail platform. A very important subject for a retail platform like bol.com. Given that we are a platform we have a lot of partners to interact with. What this episode covers To do that in a neat way we need APIs. And as a platform, we are multi-sided so we have to offer different APIs for different groups of users. So a lot of...

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". What this episode covers In an earlier episode we discussed how we moved our Big Data to the Cloud, in the Cloud as an enabler...

In this podcast, we talk with two of our coaches in tech about making an impact on the performance of teams and people. The reference they use to do this is called Human System Engineering. In bol.com we have different types of coaches with different focus areas. Outside tech, or bol.com wide so to say, we have coaches for careers, personal coaches and SPARK coaches. What this episode covers SPARK...

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. What this episode covers We are aiming for a feedba...