What this episode covers Join us for an inspiring and in-depth conversation with Ronald van Rijn, Senior Director of Engineering at bol.com (http://bol.com/), as he reflects on his first 100 days in the role. Ronald shares insights from his journey—starting as a passionate programmer with a Commodore 64 to becoming a leader of over 900 engineers. D…

What this episode covers In this episode, we dive into the world of canary releases—a modern deployment strategy that minimizes risk while delivering new features to users. Joined by Sonja Nesic and Diego Lira, we explore how tools like Argo Rollouts empower teams to test in production safely, offering seamless integration with Kubernetes environme…

In this episode, we dive into the crucial topic of Accessibility in Tech with special guests Leanne Scheepers, an engineer with a passion for inclusive design, and Niels Peter Foppe, our lead product designer and driving force behind accessibility at bol. Together, we explore how accessibility is approached at bol.com, from strategy and implementat…

What this episode covers In this episode of TechLab, we're diving deep into the world of data engineering! Join us as we chat with Robin, a data scientist from bol.com, who shares how his team tackled complex data pipeline challenges by using layered approaches and innovative solutions like Apache Airflow. Robin makes it easy to understand by compa…

Join us as we explore performance testing with experts Nithya and Marcel from bol. They share insights on ensuring system reliability during peak seasons through chaos engineering and isolated testing. Discover best practices, tools, and strategies to tackle performance challenges and enhance user experience. Tune in for valuable tips from industry…

On this episode we're joined by Bart Enkelaar and Rob Klein Gunnewiek as the experts on SRE! This talk will cover lots of SRE principles, insights and innovations within the teams at Bol. Next to that, we've had a lovely chat with lots of laughter. So enough reasons to grab a nice drinks and enjoy the episode! Guests Connect with Bart Enkelaar: Lin…

What this episode covers On this episode, Lee September joins us to tell his inspiring story on Neurodiversity and Leadership. He shares his personal journey from engineer to management and how being neurodivergent played a role within this story. From personal growth to being inclusive to anyone. Knowing when to read the room and adjusting accordi…

Today we're joined by Rogier Lommers, a Space Tech Lead within Bol who has been working on the roll-out of Distributed Tracing at scale. We'll dive into the initiative and how this currently works in production. Next to this, Rogier shares some insightful tips on how to start. What this episode covers In this episode, we explore distributed tracing…

Ever wondered what it's like being a Google Developer Expert? What does this title mean, and how do you achieve being in this position? What do you day from day-to-day and what are the responsibilities coming with the title? Today we have a really inspiring guest joining us! Ahmed Tikiwa is a Google Developer Expert for Android and a seasoned full-…

Time to kick off the new season of TechLab! Before we dive into cool topics with all our guests, we'd love to introduce ourselves to all of you. This episode will dive into the introduction of the two new hosts. What is the reason of continuing the podcast, and what is on our minds?As always, we're super curious on hearing your thoughts! Let us kno…

It has been a while, we are back with a very special episode. One we never had before. One we knew one day would come. People were already asking on X “Will there be new episodes of Techlab”. And the answer is: Yes!As initiators of the Techlab Podcast we produced 118 episodes. Started in 2019 so 5 years ago. And the good news is, Techlab Podcast wi…

There are two pillars in this episode. We start with the Technical Platform at bol.com. We'll explore what type of software engineering these teams are working on and what they are trying to achieve for the rest of our engineering community.The other part is Product Discovery. We try to figure out what problems we are solving in the discovery phase…

Moving Elastic Search to the Cloud. Elastic is one of the core components of the eCommerce Tech Platform. It powers the search engine as well as other trivial functions. In our own data center it has the biggest footprint. Time to discuss how the team approached this cloud journey. What this episode covers In this episode we want to answer these qu…

If you look at the title of this episode, you might think that we are going to unveil our details about how we protect the bol.com platform against DDoS attacks. We should be clear about this, we just can’t in the current world we live in. But we wanted to talk about this because the solution used is worthwhile sharing. So we double-checked with ou…

Chantal is on a mission. To make people aware of the buying drip or in Dutch "Koopinfuus". Together with Chantal we dive into this phenomenon and discuss what it is. We find out what the three pillars are that contribute to this drip. We make the connection with Tech. Tech empowers platforms like bol.com to use for the good and bad. Never before it…

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 …

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 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 Po…

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…

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? Inta…

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 …

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…

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…

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 br…

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…

Over three years ago we published our third podcast episode. The topic of the episode was the Go programming language. We noted, “When you listen to the stories our two enthusiastic guests share in this episode, you might even believe Go is the future.” So, let's check in and see how things have evolved.The number of feature teams in bol.com using …

We discuss the way of working of the Tech Lead and Architect in the Marketing Domain. Functional- and Technical aspects need to be taken into account when defining the direction of the development teams.From our guests Alexandra and Lennart, we learn what cooperation means in these relatively new functions. What this episode covers Product-Led is a…

A few months ago we noticed a message that stood out on our internal platform. Basically, it stated: "I'm back". Naturally, it happens every now and then that employees explore their horizons but still return to bol.com. What this episode covers However, the number of software engineers that turn to indie game developer and come back, is quite limi…

Everybody can go to bol.com and check the Front-End of our webshop. But what if you are a seller, supplier, partner or internal employee? What is your view when interacting with our IT systems? In general, you will use one of our Portals. These portals made a long journey to get to the stage where they are today. What this episode covers Not only d…

Welcome to episode number 100!A special show with a very interesting topic: Inclusion of Introverts and Introversion. We asked our CEO Margaret Versteden for a quote for this number 100. She surprised us with the fact that this topic is so important for her as she is dealing with this her whole life, as an introvert.So if you are an extrovert, we t…

We are not only the hosts of the show but so far we also do the selection of the topics ourselves. Research what’s interesting. Find diverse subjects and guests, etc. What this episode covers And sometimes guests make it easier for us. They post on our internal platform a message…. “What is the superlative of bragging? I don't think I can go any fu…

This episode is 2021 Techlab Wrapped. Inspired by one of the platforms that host our podcast Spotify.It is the end of Season 3 and the end of 2021. Time to look back and to look ahead. What this episode covers 2021 Wrapped and maybe a glimpse into 2022. We look back at 2021 by the numbers. Top 3 lists Top 5 countries We discuss the topics and episo…

During the recording of this episode, we are in the week of Black Friday. An exciting week for people hunting for bargains. And also for a lot of our colleagues. What this episode covers Whether that is from a commercial point of view or an engineering one. All the eyeballs on our website, bring a lot of traffic. And consequential a lot of load on …

If you are a regular listener to the podcast or an e-commerce watcher, you know “the season” is very important for us. It is a yearly recurring theme in the podcast. You are probably also aware that uptime and responsiveness of our app and website are crucial. What this episode covers And you might have noticed that enabling our software engineers …

In this episode, we virtually visit the AI for Retail Lab and dive with two members into the world of recommendations. The AI for Retail (AIR) Lab Amsterdam is a joint UvA-Ahold Delhaize industry lab and conducts research into socially responsible algorithms aimed at the retail domain. Think of developing models for recommendations and managing goo…

Warehouse mechanization is a part of our IT landscape where our IT meets the physical world. It is one of those places where we encounter that while we could scale our IT almost indefinitely in the cloud, the physical world and warehouses don't work that way. As you listen to this episode you will learn how the world of IT has to adapt to the physi…

Some aspects of software engineering are easily overlooked. In the book The Programmer's Brain some of these like reading code, thinking about code and collaborating on code are at the centre. In this episode, we talk to the author of this book to guide us through these aspects.To improve your coding skills it is good to know how your brain works. …

Imagine you want to buy something. You go to bol.com and you start typing the article in the search bar. Automatically you will be served suggestions and as a result, you want a limited number of articles from our 30 million products catalogue. What this episode covers You select the product you want, press the buy button and there it is, at your d…

In early April the latest version of our Retailer API was launched. Given the importance of the API for almost 15.000 partners this was again a major step. Over the years the retailer API became the heart and soul of our ecosystem. What this episode covers But this path wasn't always that obvious. It took vision, decisiveness and perseverance to ge…

Engineering ProductivityWith the growth of our engineering community, the need for more focus on engineering productivity is clear. We invited two experts to discuss this topic with us. We actually got to this point when one of our listeners pointed out one of the products we are using for this and how awesome a topic that would be for our podcast.…

How interaction resulted in a guest appearance“We like interactions and feedback”, that’s what we say in our outro. The guest of our show reacted to one of our podcasts earlier this year. We reached out to him and invited him to the podcast. What this episode covers Why? Because it’s good to look in the mirror. Check our stories with the outside in…

How Data Science supports us to predict the unpredictableJust like for any store, forecasting is an important tool to support the business and its profitability. At bol.com we have worked on several major iterations of our forecast. One of the hosts worked on a large leap in forecast performance over 8 years ago. You can check some another leap we …

Why build an open-source FTP server in Rust?Sometimes, I must admit I’m a little dazzled by all the languages, frameworks and stuff our engineers work with. So, when our guest of today explained to me some of the intriguing aspects of the language we will be discussing in this episode I had to stretch my mind a little. I managed and could follow hi…

Who is the Podcast. Guests ? This will be a bonus episode. Maybe not that tech-related but instead you will listen to a very energetic, passionate and inspiring person: The Podcast NotesAutor: Anthony Moendir & Tim Beeren

What is the key competence of our business analysts (BA)We talked about domain knowledge, tech affinity and building bridges between stakeholders and software engineers. Sometimes the business analyst is almost seen as a project manager. Aligning with product owners is key in this role. What this episode covers Every business analysts within bol.co…

Next level leveraging cloud computingWe moved 70% of our services to the cloud and new services start in the cloud unless... Time to dive into a topic brought up by our tech leads. Want to know how you can maximize your cloud benefits?Alexandra wrote a blog post on Horizontal Pod Auto-scaling, HPA. What this episode covers It triggered us for this …

Writing an article is reflection, publishing it is getting feedbackLearning from our colleagues. That is important to us. So, we were delighted when we found another great piece of this on LinkedIn, Elinore shared.to inspire others who are thinking of transitioning from tech into a leadership role or are just curious about my experiences and though…

From how it was born to what it is now in 45 minutesOne of the things that make us really proud about working in Tech at bol.com is our annual Space Summit. Our internal tech conference by developers for developers. And maybe you can recall we had quite some interesting episodes, blogs and videos about it and some of the talks given there in the la…

Data Maturity Model as common ground, Data Literacy Model to measure the level of speaking, writing and reading dataTo state as a company we want to become more data-driven is the first step. To truly understand what this means and define a common ground to discuss the progress is the second.Back in the eighties, the Capability Maturity Model was d…

Supporting products with KPI's and OKR'sWe had previous episodes on how bol.com is moving to a product organization. In this one, we’ll dive into how to measure the success of these products and set objectives for them. Including measuring whether we are getting the desired results. What this episode covers Being the data-driven company that we wan…