TechLab by Bol

Introduction

In this episode, we show a little of our front-end love. And our love for testing and enjoying the quality of a good front-end. It was time for that because the last time we talked about front end related stuff was quit some episodes ago.

What this episode covers

We are going to talk about Front End Quality in an interactive-heavy application.

First, we discuss two statements/dilemmas:

• Testing is always balancing. Time vs. Quality: How much time to spent on getting all the cases (interactions) and edge cases clear vs. the level of quality.
• Testing in non-pro is overrated, Canary testing is the future

After that we will dive into the topic by going over the subjects:

1. Sketching the context & share the example
2. Explain the Front end architecture
3. Discuss the test setup and how it is different from the rest of webshop- including tools and frameworks used
4. Lessons Learned

Interaction in the checkout results in changed components

(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/3e7a23158edc1c83143952c836fa1df6373c0208-1159x878.gif)

Guests

Kasper Peulen; Full Stack Engineer at bol.com
Jan Jaap Verheij; Senior Test Automation Engineer & Scrum Master

Both in the shopping domain working on the checkout.

Notes

Typescript

Storybook

Cypress

Always start your project with Typescript in strict mode.

Today we take a look behind the mask. The moment we recorded this podcast episode the 2nd wave of Corona is hitting The Netherlands. In the first wave, the Corona crisis was causing a lot of pressure and stress on our healthcare system and nurses & caretakers specifically.

With a couple of IT Young Professionals, we are helping a great project called “Behind The Mask”. It is a joint effort of UMC Utrecht, TU Delft and Erasmus MC.

What this episode covers

The project aims to help nurses maintain mental and physical health by providing an online platform where they can share experiences and stories and help each other by giving tips, support and sharing articles.

As Bol.com we are helping them with a team of Young Professionals. We are providing them with technical expertise and guidance to get this unique platform up and running.

Guests

• Nathan de Bruijn; Software Engineer in bol.com started in team Hedwig (marketing campaigns) and participant of the YP program 
• Andras Herczeg; Software Engineer in bol.com and participant of the YP program, which he almost finished and friend of the show (Hackathon)

Other team members in the program are:

• Boyd Hogerheijde
• Vidjinder Hoeba

Notes

Support Behind the Mask

"This is how we do IT", is the slogan of our Techlab site and podcast. Every now and then we reach out to external guests to learn from them and exchange ideas. We are really happy to have this external guest in our show to talk about "Let's get ethical".

What this episode covers

This multi-talent released her book ‘De bubbel’ mid 2019 after 15 years at Google, Spotify and Booking.com. She writes columns for the Dutch newspaper FD. One of those was the reason for me to reach out and invite her to the show. Currently, she is advising startups and scale-ups on their commercial and marketing strategy and she is a mentor for the SVDJ Accelerator (Foundation for Dutch journalism).

In this episode, we first get to know Sanne and her career a bit better to understand where the statement "let's get ethical" comes from. We discuss her book and the story of this woman who starts her career in a start-up and get dragged into "situations that have to be shared" as Sanne explains. The redline of her journey ethics in the tech-industry unfold when we make the step to the TedX talk and her call for the moral quotient. We wrap up talking about one of her columns about 'The Platform Bitch' which resonates when she shares her takeaway:

Rethink your relationship with tech.

Guests

• Sanne Kanis: Tech & Media Executive, Ex-Spotify, Google and Booking.com, TedX Speaker, Columnist FD, Author

Notes

A call for morality in tech (TEDx talk)

Her own website including the links to all FD columns

The Netflix Documentary-Movie The Social Dilemma

Open podcast platform Podimo

The platform for kids QniQr where they can set up their own shop and manage their own money

Books:

Sanne Kanis, De Bubbel (English translation is work in progress)

Timothy Ferriss, The four work week

Timothy Ferriss, Tribe of mentors

In this episode, we touch a field that we don’t explore that much, Architecture. To be more precise: Sociotechnical Architecture to maximize impact. In a way, it's strange since Peter Paul has worked as an architect for quite a while.

What this episode covers

On the website of our guest, esilva.net, it's called “co-design organizational and technical systems to maximize impact”. We think there is so much to explore in these words Sociotechnical Architecture so we asked Eduardo to join this show.

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We discuss what it is and also, why it is fundamental to maximize the impact of our products and the teams building & owning them. We discuss the 5 traits:

1. Conway's Law
2. Team Cognitive Load
3. Team Boundaries & Interrelations
4. Continuous Discovery & Delivery in Team
5. Understand your context & Design based on that

And to make it tangible, we discuss this topic based on the great example Eduardo uses on his website as well: 'the restaurant' and we relate to examples within the bol.com tech community.

Guests

• Eduardo da Silva; Technical Leader & Sociotechnical Software Architect at bol.com and friend of the show.

Notes

• Blog and link to Spaces Summit video on Sociotechnical Architecture
• Why and What of Sociotechnical Architecture
• Traits and Strategies of Sociotechnical Architecture

Books:

• Accelerate
• Team Topologies

Bonjour ! Félicitations messieurs, il y a seulement deux semaines, que le bol.com application multilingue est disponible dans les app-stores.That's how we started this episode. Congratulate our guests with the launch of the multilingual bol.com app. It was launched in the French-speaking part of Belgium, Wallonia.

What this episode covers

With this launch, over 5 million French-speaking Belgians were able to shop in their native language.

In this episode, we dive into this move to multilingual that started two years ago. After the 'why' and 'when' we go into the 'how'. From both an architectural and project management perspective, this is really interesting. We share the best practices and learnings and close off with a small peak in what's next.

Guests

• Jan Willem Mathijssen: Business Architect/Program Manager/Innovation lead multilingual app
• Johan Wijnmalen: IT project manager at bol.com

Notes

Bert Kruismans – Belgium celebrity

Portfolio management by agile at scale

The bol.com app on apple

The bol.com app on android

Site Reliability Engineering, or SRE, is seen by a lot of people as the next logical step in developing DevOps capabilities. SRE takes concepts from software engineering and puts them to use in an operations context. Over the last 3 years, we have been experimenting with SRE approaches and gradually integrating them into our DevOps way of working.

What this episode covers

In this episode, we share the experience we gained on our journey.

Guests

• Bart Enkelaar; Software Engineer and SRE advocate in bol.com and external speaker and friend of the show (SRE during spaces summit 2019)
• Rob Klein Gunnewiek; System Engineer Extraordinaire and Site Reliability Engineering guru.

Notes

Bart's SRE presentation on SRE during spaces summit 2019

The starting point for SRE at Google.

Books on Site Reliability Engineering

Welcome back after the summer holidays! Hope you were able to enjoy an awesome break. We took some time to prepare some great podcast episodes for you.

Holidays, always a nice moment to reflect on things. One of the things might be your personal development and productivity.

What this episode covers

Saying yes to too many things, do these things add to my personal development, how do you keep track on all these commitments, how do you ensure you don’t drown and eventually don’t be productive at all. Sounds familiar to you these questions? Keep listening, we dive into the personal experiences with the two guests of the show.

We discuss some nice statements on personal productivity:

• If I am invited for a meeting and I don’t know my value/contribution I skip the meeting.
• I say “Yes” too easily so I need a strict WoW that helps and remind me to say no.
• There’s no I in a team but there’s an I in Winner (Team over Person or not?).
• Tools like GTD, Pomodoro etc are all useless. The only thing that matters is self-discipline.

Guests

• Bart Enkelaar; Software Engineer and SRE advocate in bol.com and external speaker and friend of the show (SRE during spaces summit 2019)
• Eduardo da Silva; Technical Leader & (Socio-technical) Software Architect at bol.com and friend of the show to be…. Stay tuned.

Notes

Your personal Northstar

Getting Real, by Basecamp

Share your personal goals in the team goals: Team Canvas

Gamify your life and reach your personal goals with Habitica

Write, plan and get organized with Notion.so

Pillars, Pipelines and Vaults (PPP), by August Bradley

In this episode, we take another look, a fresh perspective on Data Science for Logistics. In earlier episodes, we talked about related topics like Forecasting and crafting a Picking Algorithm using Data Science.

With the guests of this episode, we dive into two specific challenges in the warehousing domain, the cost-based selection is the first one and the second is put-away with simulation as the red line.

During the recording, we found out that our guests have a big dream: realizing the Digital Twin of the bol.com fulfilment centre. But at the same time, they are very practical and they explain how they started with the two examples and how this will eventually add up to the digital twin.

What this episode covers

To speak with them:

It would be very nice to create a digital twin of the warehouse to simulate the whole warehouse to create not local but a global optimum.

Guests

• Christianne Wisse – Data Scientist at bol.com and a professional doctorate in engineering at the Jheronimus Academy of Data Science (JADS)
• Charles de Leau – Data Scientist @ bol.com with an interesting background in Logic (BA, MA Philosophy), Statistics/Science (Bsc, MSc Criminology) and Data science (National University of Singapore). He previously worked as a consultant in Sydney, Singapore and the Netherlands.

Notes

• Digital Twin - how wiki explains this
• The simulation of the put-away mechanism. It represents one zone in the fulfilment centre. Every green tile represents one closet. The greener it gets the higher the volume in that closet.

(Image: https://cdn.sanity.io/images/qxrxmo3r/techlab-prd/5824c3f2d24d53b361c91cc10e315caf303385bf-500x500.gif)

We changed roles for this unique episode. And why is that? We are going to look back on the first 55 episodes. So, Peter Paul and Peter will be the guests of this show and Niels Kuiper and Bruno Lauwers will be your host.

Our motto is 'sharing is caring'.

What this episode covers

So, practise what you preach and share the podcast journey as well. That was what we had in mind. We share how it all started over a year ago. We dive into the learnings and memorable moments. We were asked about our dreams and plans for the next 55 episodes. What did we learn from each other? We share our own favourite podcasts and of course the advice we can give to people that want to start. Spoiler: just start and have fun....

Guests

Peter Brouwers - Team manager in IT. He started as a Service Delivery Manager and is now leading one of our Site Reliability Teams, Project Leads and Software Architects.

Peter Paul van de Beek - Working as an IT team manager in bol.com. Started at bol.com as software engineer and turned to IT architect.

Notes

The favourite podcasts of Peter and Peter Paul:

BNR de Technoloog, F1 aan Tafel, over transformaties, de pacer, NOS formule 1 podcast, Ladybug podcast (EN), Echt gebeurd, Man Man Man, Land of the Giants

Top 10 Huge Podcast Mistakes

When it comes to developing software we use the adagio: You built it, You run it, You love it. Same should hold for all the -ilities or non-functional requirements. So, one should love their logging.

One of the subjects that we did not really touch yet in our podcast is non-functionals.

What this episode covers

Today we take a closer look at logging. An aspect that typically fills some of the non-functionals or -ilities. Love your logs and Love the people after you.

For the first time in the history of the bol.com Techlab podcast, we are able to provide 5 free eBooks about today's topic. Because that was the starter for this episode. We were contacted by the publisher of this book if we were interested in an episode about logging with the author of this book. So, we came up with the idea to combine it with the bol.com way of logging. During the episode, we will explain what’s needed to obtain one of these codes.

We start our logging journey talking about moving away from monoliths. This brings a challenge for logging and tracing. Next, we dive into the question: Logging for logging vs logging for alerting? All this is on the receiving end. What about the production of logging? What are the best practices for producers? And we wanted to learn how organisations deal with demanding teams. Last part is about the balancing act of engineering. And of course, we have our famous closings round: the most important takeaways.

Guests

• Phil Wilkins – has spent over 25 years in the software industry. Is a Senior Consultant and Tech Evangelist working for Cap Gemini. Specializing in cloud integration, APIs, and related technologies. Phil is TOGAF certified. Recognized by Oracle as an Ace Director (independent technology advocate) for his contributions to the integration and PaaS community. Has written a few books including the one we talk about today: Unified Logging with Fluentd.
• Tjebbe Vlieg – System Engineer, in his 4th year at bol.com and really enjoying it, strong in logging, monitoring and metrics.

Notes

• The Book: Unified Logging with Fluentd.
• ELK Stack
• fluentd
• ELK vs ELF stack