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 Deployment Definition tool which combines the functions of Terraform, Cloud SDK and Puppet Labs.

It helps us to ensure Recovery, Security, Self-service, Stability and Scalability in our move to the cloud.The reason we think we need to secure these aspects: Bol.com has over 100 scrum teams innovating our IT-landscape with over 500 services. We must secure our 10 million customers' data and the data of our 23.000 sellers.

Guests

• Jeroen Schutrup; Site Reliability Engineer in the team that develops the R2D2.
• Quiran Storey; Site Reliability Engineer - just like Jeroen solving operation problems with software solutions.

Notes

Overview of the R2D2 architecture

(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/cd7a5b48d10ef97931e5f3b4b6e6fcd816114ff3-569x380.jpg)

Google Cloud (GCP)

Google Cloud SDK

The main orchestration tool Puppet

Terraform

Python

Other cloud episodes and blogs:

• Redesign for the Cloud
• Cloud enables data-driven
• Move data in the cloud with Stanley

Shopify's story during SRE 2018 in Dusseldorf

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 jury came up with a top 3 and handed over the cup.

Demo Time - Jury handing over the First Price!

(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/cc56dca8eb2deb92c953014c004e8f2a5bbcdc7a-507x380.jpg)

Guests

• Kardelen Hatun - Software engineer in the Retails Platform Space and organiser of this edition of the hackathon.
• Edith Kanters - One of our robotics enthusiasts. So, guess what her project is about....
• Anastasija Efremovska - Software Engineer for our Tech Platform.
• Andras Herczeg - Software engineer, one of our Young Professionals.

Notes

Some of our hackathon projects make it to PRO.

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 professional program.
• Martin Cekodhima; software engineer in 4B – financial processing – even sexier than Bond. It's FinTech in an e-commerce company, need we say more?
• Remco Snelders; Had several roles in bol.com both in Tech and other parts like Business Development. He is currently the lead for the Young Professional Program.

Notes

Our next Tech Talent Night to explore our IT Young Professional Program – an unforgettable 2-year journey at the largest online retailer of the Netherlands & Belgium.

Online interview with one of our Young Professionals.

Check the IT Young Professional

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 fine-grained flow control. Clearly, that was done for a good future... but, does it have any future nowadays? How other programming ecosystems reacted to the appearance of the reactive-streams standard and did they adopted that standard?

(Video: https://youtu.be/8iRea_qwOC8)

presentation starts at 6:25.

Guests

Oleh Dokuka is a senior software engineer at Netifi and co-author of the book, “Hands-On Reactive Programming in Spring 5”. He is an active committer to Project Reactor and RSocket, as well as a contributor to Reactive GRPC. In 2019, he was a finalist in the Oracle Groundbreaker Awards in recognition of his expertise with Java.

Notes

• Project Reactor
• RSocket
• The book of Oleh: Hands-On Reactive Programming in Spring 5
• The Reactive Manifesto

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 aspects and in this episode we might find out what the women/men diversity brings into tech. At least that was the idea when we started. It turned into an interesting talk about among other things feedback, personal leadership and vulnerability. So not necessarily the women in tech episode. Interesting for all of of us. Hope you enjoy it.

Guests

• Petra Heesink; Started as a test engineer in development and became an Agile Coach in the Content and Marketing domain in 2018.
• Linda Viksne; Software Engineer in bol.com joined in July. Latvian-born Scotland-bred biomedical scientist turned software developer.

Notes

The mindset intervention - IT professionals taking the lead the talk by Petra and Linda at European Women in Tech.

Imposter Syndrome

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 of our users but is very much needed for a large part of our 23.000 plaza partners. The Seller DashboarD or SDD in short. The User Interface for other retailers that sell on our platform. This is a substantial part of the turnover that starts here. So, let’s talk about UX Research focused on the platform.

The Seller Dashboard is implemented in the SWAPS that we discussed in an earlier episode of the podcast. We have looked at UX for the webshop before and discussed voice interaction patterns.

Guests

• Koen Olijve; UX designer at bol.com - special focus on the user interface for the plaza partners and the partners that advertise on our website.

Notes

Explanation of NPS

Partner involvement in action: Vote as a partner on the next technical improvements

Task Driven User Interfaces

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 challenging to a lot of colleagues.

What this episode covers

Especially if it is a conference of 5 days, over 200 speakers and sessions and over 3200 attendees. And our three guests present there. They share their road to Devoxx Belgium.

Guests

• Tom Stoepker, Software Engineer and with his second presence friend of the show. Presenting "Scaling Sustainable Innovation through Team Autonomy”.
• Raul Leal, designer of the backend systems and presenting “Bol.com and the Accelerated Legacy Challenge”.
• Rene Kroon, Software Engineer and with his second presence also a friend of the show. Presenting about “Re-design for the cloud A real-life example of horizontal scaling”. Which might sounds familiar if you listened to previous episodes.

Notes

Re-design for the cloud: a real-life example of horizontal scaling.

Spaces summit, our internal conference

The power of storytelling

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 careless holidays for our customer”.

During this period every piece of the puzzle must fit. When load triples items like scaling, reliability, page load-times, predictability, up-times and service dependencies come together. The webshop connects with appr. 60 services and downstream that amount counts up to over 600. How do we ensure that the experience of the customer is what they expect from the bol.com retail platform? And maybe even more important, how do we ensure that Sinterklaas and the Santa Claus have their presents in time avoiding this disappointed faces of kids?

Guests

• Joshua Potgieter; Software Engineer in the Shopping Space.
• Lars de Bruijn; Software Engineer in the Shopping Space.

both are Site Reliability Engineers with a strong focus on the webshop.

• Sven Weeda; Service Delivery Manager in Shopping and IT Project Lead for the Holiday Season. Helping all teams in bol.com IT to prepare for the season.

Notes

How we deal with emergencies during the season

perfect storm scenario

Site Reliability Engineering, Service Level Indicators (SLI's), Service Level Objectives (SLO's) - Bart Enkelaar discusses SRE in this episode, this is the Google definition

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, people realized that we needed to deliver the same functionality in different Front-Ends.

What this episode covers

For instance content management for our internal product managers and for our external sellers (Plaza partners). 

We had to fix both these issues and came up with what we call Small Web Apps. That can be separately deployed and work together in a portal. At the same time, they can be used in the portal that faces the plaza partners and the internal users.

Guests

Elinor Bakker; IT Architect responsible for the introduction of SWAPS back in 2015.

Stefan Nieuwenhuis; Software Engineer in the retailer assortment domain and SWAP advocate.

Notes

SWAPs: From monolith to small web applications

Meetup presentation by Stefan - Speaker deck

Learn more about our partner platform

Design System Setup - Airbnb

Frontify for more documentation

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 interesting aspects to cover.

Guests

Jarno Walgemoed; Owner at Sourcelabs; Software engineer with a strong focus on partner API’s at bol.com;

Willem van Schieveen; Team lead in the shopping platform; former PO of the app API, partner APIs & API Gateway. API advocate.

Notes

More about the Retailer API

More about the Open API (or Partner API)

The barcode scanner example which uses the open API functionality that is now also available in the bol.com App.

Inside in the evolution of services and autonomy and the rise of API's