TechLab by Bol

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

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 to becoming more data-driven.

When moving applications and services to the Cloud we think about redesigning them, like in this case to enable non-functionals that weren't possible in our data centre. Horizontal scaling and especially auto-scaling has enormous advantages for some of our services. Together with Rogier and Rene, we talk about new possibilities and especially about design for the cloud – horizontal scaling.

Guests

Rogier Lommers - Friend of the show and Software Architect.

Rene Kroon - Software Engineer in our Platform Space. Where we deliver the building blocks that development teams use.

Notes

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

Going to Devoxx Antwerp? Join Rene Kroon at his presentation Scheduled on Thursday from 12:55 to 13:10 in Room 6

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 is our holocracy/network way of working.

Burgert joined bol.com recently and was asked to reflect on what he encountered during his first months. We preach autonomy which brings a lot, but all good things have a 'dark side' so he says. Suzanne and Burgert share great examples of how they are looking at people and teams. The approach they use is Human Systems Engineering. They share some insights and how to impact the performance.

Guests

Suzanne Heerschop; Coach in Tech focusing on the Shopping area and fanatic sketch noter. Using drawing as a second language to create a better understanding. She acts as an ambassador of visual impact. Trying to build a community of people like to engage with others this way.

Burgert Kirsten; Coach in tech, focusing on the Logistics area with a love for improv theatre.

Notes

Our holocracy way of working is discussed by Harm Jans in this podcast.

Coach for compliance or coach with compassion

Human Systems Engineering (HSE)

Our autonomous way of working explained here

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 feedback loop of 1 second. So 1 second after and action was performed by a customer in our webshop the data is available for service that handles personalization and recommendations. These services, in turn, provide data to the webshop to create a personalized experience for every customer.

Guests

• Niels Basjes - IT Architect and international keynote speaker giving lectures about this and other subjects.
• Oscar Westra van Holte Kind - Software Engineer in the Measuring 2.0 team

Notes

Niels Basjes on Measuring at Berlin Buzz words 2019

Measuring 2.0 at Spaces Summit

Niels Basjes at Berlin Buzz words 2016

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

The subject of the book how to accelerate your organization is closely related to many subjects we talked about in our podcast series. For instance Agile at Scale and Speeding up by Testing.

Jurriaan and Rini are both very experienced in this field. They come up with great examples around themes like how to simplify and power to the people that do the work.

Guests

• Jurriaan Kamer; Partner of The Ready focusing on Organizational Design and Transformation Consultant, Speaker and Author;
• Rini van Solingen; Professor in global software engineering. CTO @ Prowareness. Expert in speed and agility of people and organizations, Speaker and Author;

Notes

Formule X - The book on how to accelerate your organisation;

The FASTER model

Avondseminar: Formule X - Versnel je organisatie

North star Metric

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 structured research?

In this episode, we explore the theme of success, failure and learning together with Tadéusz Siudak.

What this episode covers

Tadéusz is one of our Interaction Designers working on the webshop. Like all our employees he is aiming to improve every day. Making the lives of our customers easier.

To give a good perspective on the context we also elaborate on how interaction design is performed at bol.com. In the episode, we also take some sidetracks looking into thinks like guerilla testing.

Guests

Tadéusz Siudak

Notes

Learn more on voice interaction.

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 spread over these roles to ensure that we can release to PRO without fearing what will happen?

And there have been other evolutions like the one to more micro-service-oriented architectures and companies moving to the cloud. Both coming with their own challenges. What is the impact on testing and testers?

Guests

• Joost van Wollingen; Consultant Quality and Test Automation at Xebia and former colleague at bol.com in a test role. The lead of the test guild. Who has grown really close to a software engineer? We have worked together in several settings here;
• Ivo de Bruijn; Software engineer at bol.com who started in a test role;

Notes

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Other notesIsolated testing - replacing the way testing in DEV and TEST was done. No more dependencies

Technical Aspects (like the introduction of Service Oriented Architecture) and Cultural Aspects (like the introduction of You Build It, You Run It, You love It) are both influencing the way testing is approached

Speed is key. if you create a fast feedback loop and it only needs 5 minutes to build, you stay in your context.

Shift Left vs Shift Right is explained. Earlier testing on DEV and do more on PRO.

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** as long as tickets are available

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 cloud and we got some nice insights that we wanted to share. We asked our two guests of this episode to do so.

It turned out to be an interesting talk about data quality but also about 'data wrestling'. About how to migrate your older data platform into an up to date data platform. About training your business consumers in their mind-shift from 'resource-aware' to 'cost-aware'. And about how to explore all the new opportunities that come with this new setup.

Guests

Anne van den Brink; Manager Business Intelligence Platform & Support

Arthur Hansen; Business Analyst in Finance – Controlling

Notes

Atscale; the layer in between BigQuery and Tableau

Tableau; the BI tool used by 50% of the company to do their daily analysis

BigQuery; Google's Datawarehouse running in the Google Cloud Platform (GCP)

One of the opportunities discussed in this episode is about data science. In earlier episodes we spent some time on this subject: Forecasting, Intent Recognition