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Hamburgers & Knowledge sharing at Coolblue Tech

In 2014, we created an event called “Behind the Scenes” [BTS] at Coolblue. And over the years, not much has changed. The event starts off with hamburgers at around 18:00, followed by a few presentations about various topics, delivered by people who work at Coolblue Tech. After that, we treat our guests to a tour of the office and show them our cool meeting rooms. To wrap things up, we enjoy a few drinks at our very own bar, located in the cafeteria. Once all of that’s done, there’s only 1 thing left to do: making sure that everyone leaves before midnight. 😉



Coolblue Tech’s a pretty big department, with a bunch of interesting people from different backgrounds. Thanks to this, there’s a broad variety of subjects and skills that we’re able to expand on during our presentations. So you’re always in for a treat. Topics can include interesting new technologies that we’ve discovered, useful technical tricks we’ve found out about, or simply how we do things at Coolblue. We even hosted a “failure” night once, during which we shared 5 informative stories about epic failures at Coolblue.

Everyone who’s interested is free to join our BTS event, but we often have to close the sign ups early because we’re sold out. So far, we’ve organized 13 events and served more than 1000 hamburgers, which should roughly align with the number of visitors. How’s that for math?

But why do we even host this event in the first place? Well, for plenty of reasons. Allow me to share a few of them:

• When we first started out in 2014, we mainly created the event in order to hire new colleagues. And we thought the best way to do this was by giving prospective hires an insight into Coolblue. Because who wants to work for a company that he or she doesn’t know? Even today, this is still one of the main reasons we host the BTS event.
• It’s the perfect opportunity for sharing ideas, having discussions, and receiving feedback. Afterward, our presentations often lead to lively discussions at bar. At the end, we hope that we’ll both our visitors and us will have learned a thing or two.
• The BTS event serves as the perfect opportunity to expand your business network. We’re all in the IT industry, and it can be pretty informative to get to know some colleagues at other companies that face challenges similar to ours. A lot of people are interested in Coolblue, and even high profile people like CTOs and CIOs visit our event. We’re all equals, so while you’re chomping on your burger, you can ask the how they built their careers.
• We’re also invited to other events ourselves. For example, Matthew Hodgkins and Flynn Bundy were recently invited to talk about their work regarding containers, PowerShell Desired State Configuration and ChatOps, at conferences in Hannover and Singapore. Thanks to their experience with delivering presentations during BTS, they were well-equipped to perform on an international stage. So, BTS is sort of like a learning school as well.

Whew, all of this makes it sound like hard work. But don’t worry, we love doing it! We like our work, and we’re pretty proud of our achievements. But most of all, it’s fun to share this with all of you.

Would you like to attend BTS as well? Good news! We’ve organized plenty of new events in 2017. You can find the schedule here.