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:

1. Episode Office Automation: creating the prerequisites for WFH. A peek behind the screen of our Office Automation hero’s. Sharing how they prepared and showed their contribution in these uncertain times.
2. Episode Season load: What are the Consequences of the Corona measurements on our e-commerce platform and IT systems.
3. Episode Way of Working: How we moved from 1 office into 2000 offices and how our 600 people tech community adapted to this new reality.

In the second episode of our trilogy, we talk about season mindset. This period isn't a peak in a normal year. Being an online business we see people moving from offline to online for an additional part of their shopping. What happens in such a scenario to an e-commerce site like bol.com’s? Our guests guide you through it.

Guests

Michel Baars - Service Delivery Manager

Rob Klein Gunnewiek – Site Reliability Engineer

Notes

Trilogy Part I

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:

1. Episode Office Automation: creating the prerequisites for WFH. A peek behind the screen of our Office Automation hero’s. Sharing how they prepared and showed their contribution in these uncertain times.
2. Episode Season load: What are the Consequences of the Corona measurements on our e-commerce platform and IT systems.
3. Episode Way of Working: How we moved from 1 office into 2000 offices and how our 600 people tech community adapted to this new reality

In this first part of the Corona Trilogy, we dive into the Office Automation area. All of sudden everybody who used to work in the office has to work from home and starts using a VPN and do other unusual stuff... What happens to the people who must support this?First of all, from our perspective things seemed to work well! Our compliments for that. We guess there is more to it than meets our eyes.

Guests

Madeleine Boevé – Manager Office Automation

Notes

PingId

Jamf

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 servers that crash, hard drives that malfunction, network connections that are severed, etc.

Try to disprove the hypothesis by looking for a difference in steady-state between the control group and the experimental group.

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Guests

Luc Kleeven – Software engineer mostly working in retail platform things.

Notes

The book that was referred to, Learning Chaos Engineering by Russ Miles

Prepare for the Unknown and the Unknowable, Crossfit podcast

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 daily practise. How do you benefit from it in your job and even in making career decisions. We talk about the value of the community and the role of the coach. Setting objectives and push limits when possible or de-load when needed. We thank our guests for their openness.

Guests

• Maarten Roosendaal; Agile IT Architect & Crossfit Level 1 Trainer and former professional basketball player
• Daniela Carbunaru; Team Manager IT at bol.com and passionate crossfitter

Notes

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 so great to be part of a community. He explains the great initiatives like for instance the Speaker Incubator the JUG offers.

Guests

• Roy Braam; a Software Craftsman at JPoint. He loves Java, DevOps, and everything that comes with developing good solutions.
• Thodoris Bais; Utrecht Java User Group Founder & Leader, Scrum Master @ABN Amro, Coach.

Notes

The Meetup

Utrecht Java User Group

Previous podcast on testing

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 be let down.

Given the short notice, we asked Ymor to help us with their knowledge and experience to perform a performance test together with us and the supplier of the chat software. The aim was to access if we could handle the predicted peak load. The team from Ymor was on stage to share the case. A great opportunity for us as well to sit down with them and share in the podcast as well. Why? Because we became really curious. In our perception, we have an environment in which we validate performance so what did we miss and what did Ymor bring to the table.

Guests

• Marcel Wigman; Technisch Performance consultant Ymor
• Hans van Santvoort; Solution Manager Ymor
• Peter van Dijk; Product Owner in the Customer Service Domain, focus on Live Chat!

Notes

Introducing voice - Improve the customer journey with Intent Recognition and Conversational Analytics

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 DB2, Oracle, Sqlserver, SABDB and PostgreSQL. As a Java (enterprise) developer, he has worked in the education sector for over 12 years and developed student information systems for each of the Dutch levels of education. During those years he has worked on the open-source Java web framework Apache Wicket and given numerous presentations on that and other subjects on international conferences and meetups. Senior Software Engineer at Topicus.
• Sebastiaan Mannem – Technically driven database, container and cloud specialist. Earned his stripes and was battle-hardened by the Dutch Government and Bol.com. Now working for EnterpriseDB as a senior consultant at Enterprise DB.

Notes

PostgreSQL Conference Europe

HVR - tool used during migration from Oracle to Postgres as safeguard

Rust - programming language used by Sebastiaan to loadtest the Postgres database

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 Zwart; Software Architect and data enthusiast

Notes

• Measuring 2.0 podcast
• Measuring 2.0 at Berlin Buzzwords

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 should open-up this competition externally as well, goto Linkedin, mailto: [email protected] or twitter us: @bol_com_Techlab

Guests

• Harmen Prins – Software Engineer in our Forecasting DS team. Has been here before in our feature of forecasting and DS, way back in May last year.
• Harsh Khandelwal – Software engineer - Sharing data with our Supplier and other partners

Notes

hackerrank.com the platform we used for the Spaces Championship

Dynamic Programming

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 actually think it can. Hope you enjoy the talk too.

Guests

In an earlier episode, we talked with Marieke Linssen about the future of voice and it is great to have her back.

And we have Tadeusz Siudak with him we talked about UX and the benefits of failing in an earlier episode.

Notes

Lean UX

GOOB - Getting Out Of the Building

Speed dating in Design Research

Empathy - Brene Brown, Simon Sinek