TechLab by Bol

In this episode of the podcast, we talk about accelerating organisations. We invited Jurriaan Kamer and Rini van Solingen to our studio. They recently launched their book - Formule X - Hoe zorg je voor extreme versnelling in je organisatie - at bol.com. The English version, How to reach extreme acceleration in your organization, will be available before the holiday season. What this episode covers...

Where do we learn most in our lives? When things that we do succeed, or when we do stuff and they don't turn out how we expected? They "fail". Exactly, we can learn a lot from our failures. How does this relate to Tech? Or, to be more precise, how does that relate to the design of the webshop? And how do we know if we succeed or fail, is it a gut feeling or do we learn through struc...

Testing in autonomous teams - speed is everything The role of testers has evolved in the last decade. Test automation has become the norm. So, testers have grown more towards developers. What this episode covers What are the skills they need to succeed? With the rise of autonomous teams and product teams, more and more tasks of testers moved to other roles like developers. What knowledge must be s...

Cloud as Enabler to become more data-driven. The adjective data-driven means that progress in an activity is compelled by data, rather than by intuition, personal experience or a gut feeling. Googling data-driven gives you over 637 mln. results so time to add an extra result to this with this episode. But we wanted to make it more specific. What this episode covers We moved our big data into the c...

'OK Google.....' - the future of voice is here. Everybody with a Google Assistant on their phone or with Google Speakers installed uses this command more and more. It’s even used by radio DJ’s to make fun and just shout out commands to see what’s happening. What this episode covers And you know when people start making jokes with it, it’s becoming a success. There is a future for interac...

Agile at Scale. Ever since we started our journey into Agile and scrum, we have been wondering whether we were on the right path for business and IT agility. Way back when we were with 7 scrum teams scaling wasn’t the most important issue. What this episode covers With our growth came challenges for scaling our agile way of working. We have been on a few plateaus where we were searching for the ne...

As podcast makers, we are very happy that we can talk about a subject that is very close to ours. In this episode, we talk about one of the recent product launches. The launch of audiobooks. What this episode covers Besides the already existing “all you can read subscription” we developed an Audiobook subscription together with Rakuten Kobo . In the world that is dominated by pictures and movies t...

One of the challenges in a (micro-)service landscape is to keep track of all capabilities in the services. Another is to keep track of the consumers of your service and the consumers beyond. Taking our IT landscape as an example: we work with over 120 teams on over 850 different applications varying from services, GUI’s, services, data builders and other types of applications. In an environment li...

This is a special episode of the bol.com Techlab Podcast. It’s recorded on at our own Tech Conference the bol.com spaces summit. Directly after Jim gave his presentation about 'scary close to fully autonomous teams at Onefootball' we interviewed him. We had a great presentation at Spaces Summit with the Title: “scary close to fully autonomous teams”. What this episode covers Within bol.c...

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. What this episode covers 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 e...

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. What this episode covers 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 en...

In this episode, we touch upon a cultural aspect of Tech within bol.com, Cultural Diversity. Over the last couple of years, our international community especially in IT in bol.com grew from 5 in 2014 to 120 in 2019 out of a total of 450 people in Tech. As a former Dutch company, you can imagine that this brings a lot of potential and it also has its challenges. In the week of the 21st of May, the...

In this episode, we talk about Axle. Axle is our internal framework for building Java-based applications. Well actually as you will learn in this episode it is not a framework. What this episode covers It is an opinionated approach to building Java applications like Spring Boot is an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with a minimum of hassle....

In this episode we dive into the world were e-commerce becomes physical. We talk about the bol.com Fulfilment Center (BFC). Within these centres, we have several challenges and one of these challenges has to do with the picking algorithm. What this episode covers The pick algorithm determines the route in a warehouse that is performed to pick all the products for a set of customers. As bol.com we...

In this episode, we talk with Daniel and Emiel, software engineer and product owner in the customer support domain. In this domain, the focus is to help our customers in the best way possible. But what if we can prevent the customer to feel the need to contact bol.com in the first place, they asked themselves. What this episode covers They realized this can be possible using the analyses of the va...

In this episode we talk about GO. Go is not a language that is used the most at bol.com. That’s is Java, together with Kotlin. What this episode covers In 2014 it was introduced for the first time and reached a steady but not so big user group. Recently, along with the move to the cloud, we experience a second wave of adoption. When you listen to the stories our two enthusiastic guests share in th...

As long as retail exists, people tried to predict the future. An accurate forecast makes it much easier to buy the correct amount of products from suppliers, know what you need to keep on stock and even know what the sales will do with specific promotions. Over the last couple of years, this domain changed dramatically because of the introduction of Data Science and Artificial Intelligence. In thi...

Kotlin was first used by our teams a couple of years ago. It had an interesting start that shows how we adopt technology in general. In different feature teams a group of software engineers explored their own use cases for Kotlin. What this episode covers Some very enthusiastic, some a bit more skeptical and eventually they found each other. A new community in bol.com was born, the Kotlin communit...

"Welcome to the bol.com Tech Podcast. In this podcast we share our experience with you to learn and entertain. Peeking behind the screens of IT and Tech in general at bol.com. Showing you our approach to IT, e-commerce and retail platforms." This is our opening sentence of the upcoming episodes of the bol.com Tech podcast. In this introduction episode we like to share with you:What is th...