TechLab by Bol

By Anthony Moendir & Tim BeerenTechnology

TechLab by Bol episodes

March 09, 2023Tech Radar - hard discussions lead to transparency
The Tech Radar is a tool to inspire and support Engineering teams at Bol.com to pick the best technologies for new projects; it provides a platform to share knowledge and experience in technologies, to reflect on technology decisions and continuously evolve our technology landscape. Based on the pioneering work of ThoughtWorks, our Tech Radar sets out the changes in technologies that are interesting in software development — changes that we think our engineering teams should pay attention to and use in their projects.

What this episode covers
We will answer questions like:
What is a tech radar?
What are we trying to achieve?
What were the hurdles to get this technology radar?
How do we maintain the techradar?

Guests
Rogier Lommers – a regular on this podcast – Space Tech Lead in our Tech Enabling space
Anthony Moendir – Discipline & Community Leader of the Tech Leads
Remco Overdijk – Has also been on our podcast before – Product Tech Lead for our Compute & Networking Infrastructure within the Shared Technical Platform

Notes
https://www.thoughtworks.com/radar
55 min
February 07, 2023Neurodiversity - Two brave guests sharing their personal stories
Neurodiversity is the idea that neurological differences, such as autism, ADHD, Tourette syndrome and dyslexia, should be recognized and respected as a natural form of human diversity, similar to cultural and ethnic diversity. The neurodiversity movement advocates for the rights and equality of individuals with neurological differences and promotes the idea that these differences should be celebrated and not stigmatized.
What this episode covers
We structured this episode about neurodiversity into a couple of main topics:
Introduction of the topic of neurodiversity and providing some background information about what it is and why it is important.
Share personal perspectives on neurodiversity; two very personal stories from the guests of our show.
Key Issues, Actionable Advice, conclusions and Call to action.
The famous closing round; what are the key takeaways from our guests?

Guests
Koen Suijkerland – Systems engineer for our TPS (Technical Platform Space).
Krissie Prusinskaite – Software engineer in Logistics.

Notes
(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/66a43f26137fbbb9c23c31cde7e15acd3dafe715-1045x255.png)
In this episode, we refer to the episode about the Inclusion of introverts
In the Netherlands you can also check out Neurodivergence and Mental Health in IT on Meetup
One of our listeners pointed out to a closed channel on Slack as well. Let us know if you want to know more.
1 hr 11 min
January 24, 2023Data Build Tool - a tool to build data
The guest of our show presented the Data Build Tool, DBT, in one of our knowledge-sharing sessions. Especially the fun part is what I recognize when I look at this knowledge-sharing session. The guest of the show presented it in an enthusiastic way and used terms like: the macro functionality makes DBT awesome and Ephemeral is the Unique Selling Point.

What this episode covers
In General
What is a Data Build Tool?
What problems does it solve?
What are the two versions? Cloud, CLI
Why is it much more interesting to use than other ETL, transformation tools?
Analytics Engineering
Explain a bit more in debt the Basics of a DBT project: dbt project data pipeline, data model, tests, macros.
Model dependencies
DBT-packages ecosystem
One of the powers of DBT is Jinja.
What could you compare Jinja to?
Is it easy to comprehend and learn?
Ephemeral (CTE) was the unique selling point for you, why?
An engineer enthusiastic about a documentation feature… that asks for an explanation.
Within bol.com
Usage started as an experiment, how are we using it in bol.com?
Can you share some learnings you and your team had when you started using DBT?

Guests
Sander Boumeester – Software Engineer in the experimentation team.

Notes
On the website of getdbt there's a cool picture that explains the framework really well.
40 min
December 13, 2022The IT Girl - Chantal Schinkels
Five years ago, Chantal found out she got a lower salary than a male colleague with less experience. Till that moment she was ok with the male-dominated Tech world. But this triggered her. She started reading about this topic, interviewed many people and decided to write this book.
She became very passionate about this important topic which you can already feel when reading the book. And while interviewing her, Peter Paul and Peter were triggered many times by this passion.
What this episode covers
The Book
The book is an excellent combination of research, examples, tip&tricks and even a dedicated chapter for men.
It’s structured in three main parts:
I: Voordat je het ziet - before you see it; there is a lot of information about why the situation is like it. It is going back to the past and explains why it is such an important topic.
II: De ladder op – climbing the stairs; A lot of different work situations explained covered with tips to deal with this in a way close to yourself.
III: Breek het system – breaking the system; last but not least the way forward to make a huge step. A dedicated chapter for men, a manifesto for more women in Tech and ideas to deal with the broader picture in and outside the company.

Guests
Chantal Schinkels – Author of “de IT Girl”
Years of experience in the world of Tech. Supports companies in e-commerce ventures. Speaker at tech events. Trainer. Author

Notes
Cynthia Nixon - Be a lady they said (short film)
Women and inclusion in Tech
51 min
November 30, 2022Order Sourcing Simulation with Data Science
Order Sourcing Simulation is needed to enable capacity steering over our warehouses, network of sellers and logistical partners. Data Science is used to predict customer behavior and simulate capacity impact.
What this episode covers
What is:
Order Sourcing
Capacity Steering (multiple warehouses, locations, etc)
What is needed to do this well?
Intake
Etc.
Now the context is clear, we can dive into the issue
What do we need to solve/achieve?
And when the why is clear, we can dive into the Data Science part:
When did Data Science popped up?
How do you use this for this issue?
What challenges do you need to deal with?
Business
Tech

Guests
Bart Terpstra – Data Scientist Logistics
Timo van Hooijdonk Business Analist en Product Owner

Notes
We refer to earlier episodes on the use of Data Science in our logistical area and for forecasting:
Digital Twin of our Warehouse
Predict the unpredictable
46 min
November 04, 2022Product-led the engineering perspective
What is a product-led organization? If you google it you will find a definition in the 1.4 billion answers similar to this:
Product-led means being guided by the potential of products and product teams, and breaking down the silos between “the business” and “the product”. The business IS the product.
At bol.com, we are on our own journey to discover what product-led means. And we see similarities with the other journeys like becoming Agile, implementing DevOps, move to the cloud we went through. Only when we start to ask our Engineers what they need it really starts to fly

What this episode covers
From your perspective what is a product-led organization?
Organization and roles.
How work comes to the team of how the teams find work.
Questions that are asked of engineers.
How people in teams collaborate.
How is it different for a software engineer compared to our Agile way of working?
Design and preparation
Implementing
Experimenting
Bringing to production
How did you get your first experience with this way of working?
Does it require new skills and habits from our engineers?
Or a more or less completely new mindset?
Was there something you struggled with
Taught you something new
Led to new insights
If there were one blog post, book, or video that engineers should consume, which one would it be?

Guests
Werner Hofstra, Product Tech Lead in Assortment & Selling

Notes
Empowered by Marty Cagan
Continuous Discovery Habits by Teresa Torres
Experimentation
Innovation Rhythm
Product Architecture
Product-led by Tech Lead and Architect
47 min
October 26, 2022Bye bye boring retrospectives
Many know the retrospective from the agile way of working. It's one of the most important sessions in working agile. If done correctly and followed up it will make you better step by step. This is also the reason many people use it as instrument to improve after for instance an emergency.
But what if retro's become boring? Some might recognize this so time to dive into this and make retro's great again.

What this episode covers
The topics of the episode are:
What were the symptoms of these boring retrospectives for you?
Why are these bad for our teams? And our people?
Could you share with our audience why this topic was important to you?
Why do we need good retrospectives?
What are the elements of a good retrospective?
What were the alternatives or additional styles and structures you came up with?
Could you share some insights on the struggles you had and what you learned from them?

Guests
Erik van der Kieft - scrum master in Assortment & Selling
Jake de Oude - Software engineer and scrum master in Assortment &Selling

Notes
The Spotify Retro Kit
48 min
August 29, 2022Growing quality in our webshop
With 2 of our engineers, we look into how we keep enhancing the quality of our webshop using canary testing and analysis, contract testing and end-to-end testing in isolation.

What this episode covers
We have quite some communities within bol.com. One of those focuses on quality. For this episode, we invited 2 engineers from this community to share some of our latest developments on this topic. They share their knowledge and experience with canary testing and analysis, contract testing and end-to-end testing in isolation.
We go over questions like:
What is canary used for?
What is a canary deployment?
When should end to end testing be done?
What is End 2 End test?
How do you perform end to end testing?
What is the purpose of doing end to end testing?

Guests
Sonja Nesic; Test Engineer in the buying domain
Ronald Nikkels; Test engineers in the buying domain

Notes
Ronald shared a link to a meetup/youtube video: Pactflow and Cypress (End-to-end Tests in Isolation using API contracts with Cypress and Pactflow).
Sonja shared an article in the quality community about Deployment Validation and Graceful Degradation at Pinterest.
42 min
August 26, 2022Tech Culture Month and the Tech Culture Manifesto
In the introduction mail, it said: “Having a culture in which we all can thrive, is one of our most valuable assets. To celebrate and cherish our unique tech culture, we are organizing events throughout the month of June. ”
From Meetups to Games, from Tech talks to sessions with the IT management and most important of all, interactions. That's in brief Tech Culture Month.
We hope to inspire you to have one yourself or participate in these tech community-building events.
What this episode covers
We discuss Tech Culture Month.
What is Tech Culture Month?
Why is a series of events like this important?
What was the feedback from the community?
During this month our Tech Culture Manifesto got introduced.
What is it?
You Build It, You Run It, You Love It!
Have Fun
Why do we have or need this manifesto?
What did we learn putting this on paper?

Guests
Babiche de Jong – Software Engineer in Logistics
Jonna Hietkamp – Principal Engineering Manager in Assortment & Selling
Tim van Hardeveld – Coordinator Onboarding, Learning & Development

Notes
39 min
July 06, 2022Demo-time; Google Glass capabilities in a pop-up Warehouse
This experiment triggered so many questions with us: Creating a pop up warehouse with Google Glass implementation, how much time does it cost? Why are we doing this? Is this totally new in the market?
What this episode covers
We dive into the experiment with this business usage of the Google Glass in a popup warehouse.
(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/1ee7d3b5ecc11dc4ba0e0f381665fc820b5ee8b2-4032x3024.jpg)

Guests
Turan Bulmus – AI/ML Practise Lead at Google for the Benelux
Niels de Vries – Data Scientist at bol.com within Logistics – stock allocation
Melih Gultekin – Software engineer/Android developer at bol.com – decide to buy

Notes
Google glass, Own OS (oreo, android)
Figma – design - https://www.figma.com
Google cloud visualizer on laptop - https://www.vysor.io/
Jackpack compose (google library for android dev.s, Kotlin)https://developer.android.com/jetpack/compose/documentation
Customer cases: Samsung, DHL and outside logistics: Health Sector
Google guidelines for color schemas
51 min