TechLab by Bol

'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 interaction by voice. Time to talk about this success with our two guests who were part of the team that introduced the future of voice in bol.com.

'OK Google...., talk to bol.com'

Guests

• Marieke Linssen; Interaction Designer with a focus on conversation design.
• Marvin Zwolsman; Software Engineer in our Young Professional program He participated in the voice project.

Notes

Google Home en Google Nest Hub - see our description on tech.bol.com here

Google Voice Interaction

Intent Recognition explained by Daniel Heres

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 next step, as have been other companies on the same venture. Today we talk about some of the things we learned along the way of scaling agile and we look into where we stand today and what could be our next leap. Our guests of today are deep into this. They are part of the “transformation team”.

Guests

• Jorien Brangert; Performed in many roles in the webshop. Got involved in agile at scale. Currently the lead in the “flight level stream”;
• Hessel de Gelder; Has worked a lot on the supply chain side. Always has been interested in strategy and innovation. Currently the lead in the “product team stream”;

Notes

Business Agility

The introduction of Microservices and the Man on the Moon project

Klaus Leopold - Flight Levels presentation at Bol.com

Output vs Outcome driven

OGSM process (Objectives/Goals/Strategies/Measurements)

OKR format (objectives and key results)

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 the book itself and reading are under pressure. But we also see that the audience for listening on demand is growing if you look at the Spotifies of this world. People get used to the concept of all you can watch, listen, etc. based on the success of the Netflixes of this world. Again Tech is driving this also for the launch of the Audiobook subscription and our guests of today's show know everything about this.

Guests

Emilie Osinga - responsible for subscriptions in our Reading and Learning shop.

Hicham Mzyati – Test Engineer in the team responsible for the delivery of all the Digital Goods – e-books; games, and the launch of audiobooks.

Notes

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 like ours, it’s crucial to understand what applications we have, what functionality they offer and who are working on them.

What this episode covers

In the past, the list of applications was maintained on our confluence pages, by hand. Later, engineers integrated properties data to become more accurate and recently a team stood up to make it ‘spot on’. One single source of truth. It’s called Software Parade.

To keep track of these we use our Software Parade. It is created and maintained with a level of fun and enthusiasm that is contagious. If you listen to this episode, you can feel the level of passion for coding and create great solutions that radiate from those involved in shaping the Software Parade. So we think it is safe to say that this is a fun way to create an overview of hundreds of applications.

Software Parade is created on a Graph Database. A Graph Database relies on Graph Theory to store, map and query nodes, edges (also called graphs or relations), and properties to these. Since for the task at hand, the relations or graphs between objects are very important a Graph Database seems a good choice. We choose Neo4j to build the Software Parade.

Guests

Kristel Nieuwenhuys; Architect with services and applications for our internal organisation in her portfolio. Besides that, she is the product owner of one of our webshop teams.

Ronald Willems; Responsible for the IT Architecture within the department Customer Service and Financial Operations at Bol.com. So for example for the Intent recognition, we talked about a few episodes back.

Notes

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.com we strive for autonomous teams because we believe that we will go faster, are more agile and we have more fun. But it is also great to hear from people outside bol.com how they perceive this. So, we are happy to introduce our external guest to you. As he worked in bol.com for 5 years but went over to another company end 2018 he is the person to ask for reflection. Time to introduce him to you.

Please bear with us, we set-up our mobile studio equipment the best we could, but as we were on this great location, you might hear some background noise and disturbance.

Happy Listening and let us know what you think, mailto: [email protected]

Guests

Jim van der Waal; Product Manager at Onefootball in Berlin. Before that, he started as Information Analyst in 2014 at bol.com and built a broad experience in roles like Scrum Master, IT Project Manager and Product Owner – presented “Life at Onefootball: scary close to fully autonomous teams”.

Notes

We discuss the move from Jim to Onefootball in Berlin and if he already feels included.

After this introduction, we dive into the why of autonomous teams at Onefootball. Jim explains which specialities/roles work together in the teams. Already at bol.com he was interested in the Lean Startup Principles and now he explains how we recognize these within Onefootball, already 200 people in total, 55 million downloads of the app and 11 million active customers worldwide.

We take some time to discuss and ask about the way of working. Several items during the presentation got our attention. Validating ideas, the discovery funnel, how people get emotionally attached to ideas, maintaining small backlogs and not spend time on investigation of 20-30 epics.

The way Onefootball deals with the fact that there are too many good ideas? Decide within the team.

A great one Jim explained: focus on output versus outcome. Output focused means, for instance, focusing on the story points, focusing on the outcome the customer value.

The setup of SRE is discussed.

Jim also discusses some themes like “the technical landscape shouldn’t describe your customer experience”.

Interested in the video of Jim's talk during spaces summit? Check here

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 engineers. It’s the 13th of June and the Techlab Podcast team is on the Spaces Summit 2019 location to give you an impression of the Spaces Summit.

In the previous episode of the podcast we interviewed one of the committee members to tell you the What, Why and Who and had small interviews with some of the presenters.

In part II of the spaces summit, we interview three presenters to give you an impression and to share the key takeaways with you. To add to the impression, we share quotes from the audience with you.

Please bear with us, we set-up our mobile studio equipment the best we could, but as we were at this great location, you might hear some background noise and disturbance.

Happy Listening and let us know what you think, mailto: [email protected]

Guests

Leon van Tegelen; Tech Community Director in bol.com

Remco Overdijk; Expert Systems Engineer - presented “Surviving the Kubernetes jungle”

Ramona de Wit van Ark; Test lead Albert Heijn – Digital Development and founder of Stichting Kalyani – presented “Testing, anyone can do it, right?”

Roy Triesscheijn; Software Engineer at bol.com – presented “The Magic of real-time rendering in games”

Simonas Narbutas; System Engineer at bol.com – presented “Connecting your coffee table to wifi”

Notes

Remco touched upon items in the Kubernetes domain. Think of the containers orchestration manager. He also explained what we implemented within bol.com to deliver the structures around the platform. We call this R2D2. (stream from 57 minutes)

Ramona talked about the three key values within Albert Heijn they have for testing:

1. Team effort
2. Investigation over validation
3. Always give feedback

We dive into the difference between the explicit versus tacit things and even the Buurman and Buurman series is discussed. She uses this in her presentation to explain the way a mini agile team works. As a founder of the Stichting Kalyani she also explains what learnings she uses from that environment in her daily practice.

Roy takes us with him on his journey to explain the way games cope with the rendering aspects. He made a great comparison during his presentation between the relatively simple environment of bol.com (only text and images) in which it sometimes takes up to one second to render the page versus the game industry where rendering should only take 0.167 seconds at the max.Another aspect he’s touching upon is the difference in fixing issues.

Simonas talked about his hobby. He created an infinite table from a standard IKEA coffee table and connected it to his SMART home installation. Because he brought the actual table we asked him briefly how his talk went.

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 engineers. It’s the 13th of June and the Techlab Podcast team is on the Spaces Summit location to give you an impression of the Spaces Summit.

We interviewed one of the committee members to tell you the What, Why and Who. More important we had small interviews with some of the presenters to give you an impression and to share the key takeaways with you. To add to the impression, we share quotes from the audience with you. There were so many interesting things to share that we decided to create 2 podcasts for you. One for this week and one for next week.

Please bear with us, we set up our mobile studio equipment the best we could, but as we were at this great location, you might hear some background noise and disturbance.

Happy Listening and let us know what you think, mail to [email protected]

Guests

Jurrie van Rooijen; Tech Director in bol.com

Niels Kuiper; software engineer and as committee member answering our questions on the What? Why? And Who?

Lisanne de Rooij; member of the Vattenfall Solar Team and Keynote Speaker at Spaces Summit: “Showing the world the power of high-end technology and sustainable energy”.

Bart Enkelaar; Software Engineer and SRE advocate in bol.com and Speaker at Spaces Summit: “Bottom-up SRE- Making an informed decision between tech-dept and innovation”.

Notes

Spaces Summit; the 3rd edition of a bol.com tech summit for and by engineers and friends. This edition had a 500 people audience of which 80 external and 40 friends of.

Vattenfall Solar team; the team of 16 TU Delft students. During this episode, we talked about the 8 winning factors of a team of which teamwork is the most important. Next to that Lisanne explains the way or working with protocols well. She’s looking forward to the launch of the NunaX, the 16th of July.

Site Reliability Engineering; SRE is the way Google runs production systems. The framework goes back to 2003. Bart explains how it aligns business innovation into operations. SRE concepts like SLI, SLO and Error Budgets are being discussed. He answers the question, do you need an SRE team or not?

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 World Day of Cultural Diversity, bol.com celebrated this with Cultural Diversity Week.

What this episode covers

For us a great occasion to have this topic discussed in our podcast.

We touch upon a lot of different aspects. It starts with the onboarding. The language barrier discussed a couple of times and is a red line in this talk. Our guests explain in a passionate way what ‘live-translation’ and ‘headphones’ do with the feeling of ex- and inclusion. What we liked most was the way they explained what they had to overcome to really feel included. Realizing that to become more valuable they need to be more included, so asking for inclusion was the next step.The open mind and withholding judgement are key as well as awareness in this transition from a Dutch to a multicultural organization. The Cultural Diversity Week was part of that.

Never realized we introduced new languages in bol.com, we call this ‘European English’ and ‘European Dutch’.

We hope that the commitment to this subject as presented by our guest come across in this podcast. Happy Listening and let us know what you think, using [email protected]

Guests

Colette Biervliet-Schranz

Mary Gouseti

Nathalie Neesen

Notes

Inclusion framework; the explanation of exclusion and inclusion with a clear model.

Four grid matrix that shows what Values in Uniqueness and Belongingness does to Exclusion and Inclusion (captures from a study, Inclusion and Diversity in Work Groups: A Review and Model for Future Research)

(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/1f2f92d425441caa2cf7cc6e5dc3daa3e961185f-500x246.jpg)

The video of our colleagues discussing their move to the Netherlands and in this Blog, Volkan describes his life as an expat in the Netherlands

Workplace; our internal facebook

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.

Since internally we use the same thing for cross-cutting concerns like logging and metrics these all come out of the box when using Axle. Besides that, it simplifies setting up common application features like messaging integration, Quartz scheduling and Hystrix resilience. In addition to that, it provides standardised REST support. Think in terms of Swagger support, the configuration of data conversion defaults and providing problem handling.

Listen and check if something like Axle could help you or your organisation.

Guests

Maurice Zeijen

Roy Jacobs

Notes

• Springboot
• Swagger UI
• Cloud Pub/Sub

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 have very high volumes of products that we must send from our warehouses to customers every day. So, it makes sense to optimize the distance that has to be walked to get those products from the racks. Besides the distance, it is also key that no waiting times occur, so the operators should be able to walk around and not wait for others. That is the reason that when you have a look inside the fulfilment centres you see the same goods spread over different places. Especially the fast moving ones. If we bring down the time needed to pick a product, we can pick more products per person per time unit.

Guests

Bram Vermeer

Maikel Houthuijzen

Notes

Change Data Capture - CDC; the way we use to get the data needed from the 'closed' database environment of the Warehouse Management System. We use the CDC solution of HVR

Reflex; the Warehouse Management system used by bol.com

Adelia; the 4gl tool used to add functionality to the WMS