An internet love story

This story takes place from March till June 1995. At that time internet wasn’t commonly used, at least not among my friends. I was studying Industrial Design at the Technical University of Delft. I was in my 4th year when I took an internship at Philips in Eindhoven. I was working at the CD-i department of Philips (Philips Media). CD-i stood for Compact Disc Interactive and it used to be a competitor of the CD-rom.
This was the title of my thesis: The WWW? What is it and what can Philips Media do with it?

I stumbled upon my old paper recently and I had so much joy reading it again, I thought it was a good idea to share. To be honest, my research wasn’t very sophisticated, but the way I described what I did made me realise how interesting it was to “discover” the internet.

Explaining the internet

Let me start at the beginning, at my introduction paragraph. I use the words “homepage” and “provider”. Words we now use commonly and without hesitation. But I felt I had to explain them back than. The funniest one is my description of a link: “a link is often a blue word that you can click with your mouse. When you do that, you get another screen with more information about the subject”. Not sure if this is a very proper definition of a link. But hey, I didn’t have wikipedia to look it up!

In the first chapter I start explaining what the internet is. And despite the fact that you could doubt if it was relevant for my research, I start with a picture of the internet physically. Apparently I felt that I needed to make the internet somewhat realistic for my readers to grab the concept, or maybe I did it to make it more understandable for myself.

Some stats I collected of May 1994:

• 20 countries connected to the M-bone
• 904 routers in the entire world
• 2 internet providers in the Netherlands

Connecting to the internet

The next step was to investigate what you could find on the internet, but for that I first had to actually make my internet connection work. It wasn’t easy to arrange! I had arranged a 14k4 modem, a phone line and an account that could connect me to the IAEHV, one of the first internet providers in the Netherlands (I think it stands for Internet Access Eindhoven). So far so good. But after I had figured out what cable to connect where and what to configure, still everything didn’t work. With some help from my provider, I found out that I needed a phone line which wasn’t connected to the phone system of the department. The switchboard messes up your 14K4 modem when you start dialling. It took me a lot of time to arrange this new separate line since it was against ‘company policy’. I had to convince some people to order it for me that had no clue what I was talking about.
But, after three weeks, I got it to work. I was so proud of myself! I still remember vividly the first moment “de digitale stad” (www.dds.nl) loaded onto my screen. For your reference, this is what I was excited about, and it took probably a minute or so to load:

My first internetpage

Internet overview

From that day on I started surfing the internet, for 2,5 months and I really loved it! I visited a huge amount of pages so that I got an overview of what was on the internet. This sounds weird maybe, but it was actually possible back then. I made a nice grid that divided the content on the internet in 6 categories and I made a lot of screen dumps to show to people that didn’t have an internet connection. My professor and the department at Philips I worked for loved it! After almost three months I really had the feeling that I had seen all the important content of the internet and categorised it.

My ‘internet overview’

Internet usage

Besides my “internet-content” research I also interviewed internet-users. These were early users of the internet, mainly working or studying at the university of Delft. It wasn’t a big group that I interviewed, but still the exercise gave some nice insights. As you can see in the overview of the results below, communication was a big part of at least the group I interviewed. Also finding content was really different, search engines weren’t invented yet.

Conclusion

After investigating the physical aspects of the internet, making an overview of the content and investigating what people actually used the internet for, it was time for a conclusion. I am actually pretty proud of what I wrote down:

• The internet will probably become pretty important in the future.
• Communication is a very important part of the internet
• Philips should integrate internet in its products
• Philips should make a Philips homepage on the internet

After more than 20 years I can happily say that Philips followed all of my advices! I am pretty sure though that this had nothing to do with my research :).

I hope this story gave you some idea on how we looked at the internet in 1995.

Team-culture, the importance of ‘how to get there’

August 2021. Since long I wanted to write a story about the importance of the right mindset in a team and I think, this is the right moment. Besides the fact that I am on holiday and I find it relaxing to write about some stuff that is om my mind. The Olympics are just over in which Sifan Hassan fell in one of the first qualification rounds, stood up, kept going and won a medal for all 3 disciplines she participated in. Also Abdi Nageeye won a silver medal at the Olympic marathon, meanwhile motivating his best friend Bashir Abdi from Belgium to win bronze, which he did. And finally Gianmarco Tamberi and Mutaz Essa Barshim choose to share a gold medal. And although I am normally not a big sports-fan, those events inspired me a lot.

Starting at Wehkamp

I started working at Wehkamp at the beginning of this year. I used to work at Jumbo, a big supermarket chain in the Netherlands and in the food business it is very busy around Christmas. So I didn’t want to switch jobs just before that and work with our team through the Christmas period so that in the quiet period that normally follows after that I could switch to another company. My idea was also that by then we would work in the office again and I could make time to meet my new team and start relaxed with my new job.

Well, I was wrong, as you probably noticed already. In January 2021 we weren’t back in the office but in the middle of the second COVID wave and working completely from home, also the physical shops were closed, so this relaxed period I was hoping for turned out to be the opposite and I started working in a super-busy E-commerce company from the exact same chair as I was working already for months, which was a weird experience.

So things were different than I expected, getting to know my new team was (and still is) hard. Somehow meeting people online is still different than in real life, which wasn’t helping me to start. Still, I did my best to talk to as many people as possible and luckily vaccinations went fast in NL and currently we can meet each other at the office once in a while.

Cherry model

In earlier blogs I have written about organisation structures that are scalable and flexible and work well with agile processes (for example this blog about the cherry model). Within Wehkamp we have transformed into a more flexible organisation structure in the last months. This is all nice, but in the end we want to be effective. And a good process and structure alone don’t make that happen.

Back to the Olympics, why is the story of Sifan Hassan, the two high-jump gold medalists and the story of Abdi Nageeye inspiring? Because they won gold and silver medals? Well this is a great achievement, but there were more winners. The reason it is the way they won them. How Sifan found the strength to continue after she fell and Abdi wanted to win together with his friend. It is not only about their results.

I believe this is also important when working in a team. It is not only the KPI’s or project planning you want to make, it is also about how to get these results as a team working synergetic together and about recovering fast after you have failed. Why is this important? Well because if you only focus on results, this is mainly short term goals you’ve set for yourself or your team. If you want to work sustainable together for a longer time you also need to spend time on things that matter for the longer term.

Changing a culture

Pointing out that growing a great culture in a team is easy, the trick is to find out how. Making it happen is hard. Also this works different in different teams, at least that is my experience. But there are a few things that I’ve tried out which helped me.

As Stephen R. Covey says in his book “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People” the only person you can really influence is yourself, so if you want to be effective see how you can pro-actively react to the people around you. To make it practical to work for me, I’ve translated that in that I should always try the best I can to give the right example of what I believe is good for the team-spirit in my team. Please note that I said ‘try’, I am not claiming that I always succeed in that :). One of the things I find really important for a team is that we work together well, don’t blame each other and learn from our mistakes. So to give an example, when a release has failed and systems have been down, we organize a post mortem (sort of evaluation). I try to avoid the discussion about who made the mistake, that’s not relevant the person/team probably knows her/himself. But I like to talk about what the reason for the mistake was, what the root cause was, how, as a team, we could have solved it quicker and how we can avoid it next time.

I believe that a big factor in building a culture in a team is by thinking hard about who should join the team, or which people should work together. So, for a big team, how to divide it in smaller (often scrum) teams. So I always try to think hard about the recruitment process we follow, who is talking to the new candidates, what kind of questions we ask, what answers we expect and how to making sure we have a proper discussion on who we choose as new teammates in our team. New members shouldn’t only be good at their technical skills, we also expect quite some level of soft skills for example. They should be fun to work with!

There are a lot of good books written about how the human mind works, what you can do to improve as a person, how to work well together as a team and a whole lot of other interesting topics. It is very useful as some of this theory is known by a team. So I try to find a way to get this done.

Pizza sessions

This last point: ‘knowledge of theory in a team‘ needs a little more attention. Because it is easier said than done to make sure a team has some common knowledge on how to work together effectively. Since I love to read books I used to recommend books to my teammates to read. After that I just assumed they did that and we could work on that bases. But I forgot, of course, that people tend to learn in a lot of different ways. Some people remember things well when they read (like me), but others rather hear it and need to do exercises to get theory in their head and there are also people who work well with visual memory. For them presentations with schema’s and drawings work well. So when I just suggested people to read certain books, this had little effect because for a lot of my colleagues this wasn’t an effective method.

After a while I figured something out. Most people like to learn new stuff, and when this is in a setting in which you can learn together and talk about the topics, it becomes more effective. So we invented “pizza sessions”, since my team also really likes pizza :) This appeared to be a success, the set-up is simple. People who like to read books, read a book they like. After that they make a summary of it and transform this in some kind of presentation (for most common books there is also a lot of material you can find on the internet for this). During a pizza session we normally start at 17.00 with (how could we not) eating pizza and meanwhile we start talking about what we did with the stuff we learned in our last pizza session. This sometimes already fills half an hour. After that the presentation starts and the presenter shares his story. We also try to do some discussions/exercises during the presentation on the topics of the books. And quickly it is 21.00 and time to go home. Some books need two sessions and we do half a book per evening and we do these sessions every 2 months more or less. In the different teams I have worked in we’ve done around 30 pizza sessions in total.

So weirdly enough pizza has always helped the teams I worked in to improve our team-culture. Not the food itself but the nice evenings we had at the office discussing important and sometimes difficult topics, stick in your head. Maybe this is another example that not only results count, also ‘how you get there’.

Pizza Sessions

October 2016. Coolblue is a young company, we like to learn. In our work, from our colleagues, and in educational settings like workshops and classrooms. Learning is what motivates us; what makes us happy to work at Coolblue.

Grab a slice

At the same time, we’re actively recruiting new colleagues. Through our workshops, we get them up and running as quickly as possible. But after a while, we all like to become better at our jobs, better in our (inter)personal skills, or see if we can grow into senior position and contribute even more.

For Coolblue as a company, it is very beneficial that we carefully cultivate this mindset. This willingness to learn is what makes people more effective and motivated. Because we’re rapidly growing, we need more people with leadership skills. So, training ourselves in personal efficiency and leadership skills sounds like a good plan. In this blog, I would like to tell you about one of the initiatives that we have taken in this area.

PIZZA & BOOKS

We’ve organized pizza sessions. What is a pizza session, you ask? A pizza session is an informal meeting between 5 to 8 Coolblueians, outside of office hours. During the session, we’ll enjoy some delicious pizza while discussing the content of an interesting book. We’ll also engage in some self-assessment. Either way, you’ll have something to chew on. At the moment, we have three variants. A combination of DISC assessment (William Moulton Marston) and The 7 Habits Of Highly Effective People (Stephen Covey). A team-orientated session about The 5 Dysfunctions of a Team (Patrick Lencioni), along with the assessment that is included in the book. And, last but not least, a session about Thinking, Fast and Slow (Daniel Kahneman), which is our most recent one and includes an exercise of own making.

Pizza sessions start at 17:00, and end at 19:30. Usually, we start off with the assessments, as it helps bring the group closer together. After that, we discuss the theory of the book, supported by a presentation. Throughout the presentation, we’ll perform several exercises that help us understand the theory. Naturally, we’ll also discuss the results among each other. Oh, and before I forget, there’s pizza as well. Usually around 18:00.

Each topics is divided into two sessions. This way, we can start off the second session by discussing what we’ve learned during the first one. It’s also the perfect moment to share how we’ve put our learnings into practice.

So far, we’ve organized 22 pizza sessions, during which we’ve eaten around 110 pizza’s. And we’re planning to organize even more sessions. We started doing this in the IT Department of Coolblue, but due to its success, it quickly spread to the whole of Coolblue. The sessions are, of course, voluntary and take place outside of working hours. And, as we often do, we’ve asked for feedback with via a Google form. And guess what? Our pizza sessions are a great success!

As you probably already know, we always try to make our customers happy. But sometimes, investing some time into makings ourselves happy can be good thing too!

First Things First

May 2017. Do you know that feeling? When you’re looking at your to-do list, trying to decide where to start. Your eye catches a specific item, but you don’t really feel like doing that one right now. You decide there’s still plenty of time to do it later and put it aside. Besides, there are several urgent items on the list which can be completed much more efficiently. So you decide to complete these first.

The next day, you still haven’t gotten around to it. Things simply didn’t go the way you planned them. Luckily, there’s still time. But then again… there are still a few urgent tasks that take priority. And before you know it, a whole week has gone by. And the item is still on your to-do list.

These tasks are often put on the backburner because they make you feel uncomfortable. Or because they force you to really think about a difficult problem, to which you might not know the answer. But by now, the original task has snowballed into a much bigger one. What’s worse, it’s going to require even more effort.

So, what happened? You probably didn’t set the right priorities, but where did it go wrong? Just know this: it wasn’t your fault. You were probably just adhering to one of the many different time management structures that are out there.

But what do these methods actually teach you? Most of them help you to set goals for yourself and establish long-term achievements. Once that’s done, you can start defining smaller steps, metrics, or KPIs which you can keep track off in a dashboard or similar tool. In turn, these tools help you to evaluate your progress and help you set short-term priorities.

At Coolblue we employ a time management tool called Remember the Milk (RTM) a training that is taught at the Coolblue University (our in-house academy). But there are plenty of other helpful books and techniques. Like Getting Things Done, by David Allen; The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen R. Covey; and Busy, by Tony Crabbe.

Do these strategies actually help you to finish your work in time? Well, only partly. They advise you to take multiple steps in order to structure your assignments, which looks great on paper… but adds more items to your to-do list. Nevertheless, these steps do help with cleaning up irrelevant/obsolete tasks. While these techniques can be useful, I believe that 1 important aspect is often overlooked. The most difficult part of time management: discipline.

By optimally utilizing the available hours for each available day you automatically become more effective at achieving your goals. But with so many distractions, like e-mail, interesting colleagues, and smartphones, this is far from easy. Then how we deal with these issues? Let me share 2 of my favorite tips with you. First, you can eliminate multiple distractions by simply turning them off. Like Hangouts, Slack, or Skype. If this isn’t possible, try to schedule dedicated time slots for them. Checking your inbox, for example. Do you really need to immediately read all incoming mail? Probably not. For most jobs, reading your e-mail twice a day is sufficient.

For my second tip, if you’re really busy and don’t feel like doing any of the things mentioned above, always start with your least favorite task. This is usually the item on your to-do that gets completed last. Don’t think about it, just do it. Trust me, it’ll make your life much easier. Why? Because completing this task will make you feel good about yourself. You’ll have more energy, which allows you to get more work done. Postponing it will only make things worse; both in your mind and in real life.

Plus, there’s an added bonus to this approach. People tend to postpone things they don’t like. Especially when these things take them out of their comfort zone or greatly affect their long-term goals. However, if you make sure to start out with your least favorite tasks, chances are that you’re making good progress on your priorities and feel good about completing them. You should try it sometime.

Cherry Picking

We are building the Jumbo Tech Campus since October 2017. The Jumbo Tech Campus is the software development organisation of Jumbo. And since we wanted the Jumbo Tech Campus to be an organisation based on Agile principles, we re-organised ourselves halfway 2018. We implemented a new structure in our organisation that stimulates us to work in multi-disciplinary scrum teams and that allows us to scale.
Why? Well, Jumbo is a fast growing company that meanwhile transforms into a more technology focused company, so as an IT team, we need to be able to innovate and scale.

Our new structure

The organisational structure we implemented is pretty straight forward. We wanted to implement a best-practice, so that’s what we did. We started with the teams, these needed to be multi-disciplinary. Meaning that a team has all the skills to be able to implement a user story from A to Z. Depending on the task our teams have, they can consist of developers, testers, consultants, ops, designers etc. This makes sure that teams can implement stories from the start to the end.
The team has a product owner, who is in charge of the backlog and one of the team members of the team acts as a scrum master. We thrive to have all dedicated product owners and from experience we have learned that 1 product owner can support two teams. The teams also have a team lead, who is mainly focussed on coaching the team on both hard & soft skills, hiring the right people and keeping an eye on the delivery of the team. So the team lead is the “HR manager”.
Two teams often have one team lead and one product owner. If you make a drawing it looks like this:

Indeed it looks like a cherry, which is a great metaphor for an agile team. Since a cherry has a strong pit, which stands for the hard skills a team needs to be effective. Team members need to be good at testing, developing or whatever their role is in the team. But a cherry also has a soft part, surrounding the whole pit. This stands for the soft skills a team needs to be effective. They need be a good team, working together not afraid to make mistakes and to get and give each other feedback.
Two teams with one lead we call a cell within our organisation and since we are a development team of around 300 people we have 35 teams all of them organised in the same way. There are around 15 team leads which are organised in three areas: Core, Digital and Data. These areas are managed by the development managers, so the team leads report into them.

Learning

One of the principles behind our development organisation is learning. We believe that when people can develop themselves, their job will be challenging, they will be more effective and more motivated to achieve great things together for Jumbo. Our organisation and our processes need to be set-up in such a way that it is easy for all members of the team to get feedback and learn. The scrum proces in itself is, of course, a good example of that, but also the team lead is very much focussed on coaching her/his team. Now we run into an issue, our teams are multi-disciplinary and it is the task of a team lead to coach the team also on hard-skills. Most of our team leads are from a development background and therefore coaching people in for example design, or testing is a challenge.

Pathfinders

Luckily we have one other team in our department, which is called our pathfinder team. Pathfinders are guru’s, really good at a specific skill. For example design, or agile and we have quite some technical pathfinders, focused on microservices, or infrastructure. Pathfinders have different tasks, one is to help team leads to coach on hard skills. Especially in the areas that team leads aren’t very much skilled in. So our Design pathfinder helps many leads to recruit the right people for their teams.
The name pathfinders isn’t accidentally chosen, they do “find the right path”. Especially between the different teams. We like the teams to be very autonomous, making a lot of decisions themselves. But teams do not always know the answers themselves and they like to get help. Also there are topics that should be aligned for the whole department. Things like code guidelines, design guidelines etc. These are all typical pathfinder topics. We always say that making mistakes is not a problem. As long as you learn from them and do better next time. On the other hand, we have 35 teams. And although making mistakes is part of the learning proces, we do not have to make the same mistake 35 times. Pathfinders avoid this.

How do we innovate?

We’ve implemented this structure to be able to innovate faster. How does this work. Well, scrum is a process in which you try to make all improvements small and fast. Making sure that you can develop new stuff quickly, implement it quickly and learn what your users/customers think of it. Which this feedback you can improve your software until it is good enough. Within our E-commerce environment we are pretty far in this sense. We can already release more times per day.

How does this organisation scale?

The organisation is pretty straight forward and scales by adding more cells to the structure. More cherries in the tree so to speak. This means we’ll have more teams, more team leads and maybe an extra development manager is needed at a certain point.

Best practice

In general, I believe Jumbo should, when talking about IT, have a best-practices strategy. In the end we are in the business of selling groceries the best way possible and not in the business of inventing new (software development) processes. So the whole story above is not unique for an IT team. It is mainly a best-practise within the IT world on how software should be build and how an IT team should be organised.

Cherry-model

As said, we are in this new organisation now for a few months. So now we start noticing how things work out. This is the moment that your team members start asking questions. Very relevant questions most of the time. And there is one question that is asked many times, especially by people that have seen other agile implementations in other companies:

Why is a scrum master not a dedicated function in itself, but a role of someone in the team? And why is there a separate team lead who is HR responsible?

I heard people talking about the “cherry-model” of Jumbo. In the beginning I didn’t understand why people talked about it. We implemented a best-practice, so what was special about the Jumbo version?
But later I realised, when designing our organisation we followed the scrum principles very thoroughly, “scrum-by-the-book”. Maybe a bit more than most companies do. So we indeed might have done something a little bit different than the mainstream. And I believe this was a very wise choice, let me explain why.

The essence of scrum is not implementing the process we all know, the rituals. It is about building a culture and building cultures isn’t easy. To make that happen in a big development team you need to do a lot. Actually everything that can help, you should do. And that’s the reason why I strongly believe the cherry model works. One thing to add here is that I do not believe in completely autonomous teams. I do believe in fairly autonomous teams; especially in larger IT teams I believe that some kind of normal HR is needed and actually very much appreciated by the people that work there. One of the reasons is that work motivation is very often strongly related to the speed in which you can learn. Learning fast is very often facilitated by some kind of mentor or coach and that is very often your manager or lead.
To build a scrum culture you need to do everything you can to make it easy for people to talk about their mistakes With the cherry model you split the responsibility of HR from the responsibility to make the scrum proces work. Meaning the team can do its proces as autonomous as possible, without a manager kind of type interfering. So when you are in a retro, the lead doesn’t need to be there making it safer to talk about your failures.
Also sometimes teams get in trouble, they can’t solve it themselves anymore. A lead is than an outsider, objective to whatever matter is at hand.

Why Lego-Technic is the microservices architecture of toys

Like many bigger IT teams do, within the Jumbo Tech Campus we often talk about the development of our IT architecture. What parts do we want to develop ourselves, which parts would we like to develop in collaboration with our partners. And with whom do we want to do what. In my experience companies have a growth path when talking about technology, organisation and partnering. In the last 2 or 3 decades most companies have made steps in their development. Recognising those phases helps in defining where your IT currently is and what to do to improve it.
Read more on Medium

OKR template for teams

If your team has clear goals, they can be more focused and therefore be more effective. A popular framework for defining and tracking objectives is OKR (Objectives & Key Results). It was originally created at Intel and later adopted by Google, where they use it intensively. Apart from within these bigger companies, I believe the OKR framework can work for every size of a team or company. I have created a template in Google Sheets, feel free to copy and use it for your company or team. Any remarks, or experiences with this template? Please share with me to help me improve it.

Growing at high-speed while keeping our culture

March 2016. Two years ago there were 38 of us in the IT development department of Coolblue. As a company we grew very fast and our backlogs were long and expanding. We had to do something about that and we decided that we wanted to hire 100 more developers. And we did!

The IT development team and the IT recruitment team have worked closely together and at the moment we are a team of 130 coders, growing with 5-10 every month.
What kind of people? Well, with PHP skills, C#, Node.js and Delphi. People with UX skills, but also system engineers, since we manage our own hardware. Business analists and data scientists who analyse our data and many others.

People often ask us , how do you manage to grow this fast as an IT team? Great that you are able to find all these people, but once they are on the team how do you manage to work well together? Good question and for us this question has a list of answers. Let’s discuss a few.

Recruitment

One of the answers lies in the recruitment itself. And it’s not just about hiring the greatest engineers. As every company, we try to find the best people, medior or senior people who have been working in their specific profession for a while. But besides the fact that you need to be skilled to work in our team, we also want you to fit our team, our culture. Why? It’s like selecting a soccer team, to get great results we need great teams. Not a bunch of individuals that like to show off. A great team passes the ball to one another, so that someone in a good position can score a goal. For that we need team players, people that know when to score themselves and when to help others to score.

Scrum

Another answer I can give is our development process. We use scrum, like almost every successful IT team. I know, that’s not original at all! But for us it’s really a root cause why we can work efficiently together. Why is scrum so useful for us? Everyone knows it and in the rare cases when this isn’t true, you can buy a book or go on a course and learn it quickly. The more we do it, the more we get experience with it.

Failing

We manage our growth through the way we deal with things that go wrong. We use this phrase “every day a little bit better”, very often. What does it mean exactly in Coolblue? Well, we fail every day, when making code, when releasing code, when configuring a server or when making changes in the way we organise ourselves.

But we really focus on making small steps. We do continuous deployment, releasing daily several times with small adaptations to our software. So yes, our site and our internal systems go down once in awhile. But when it happens we make small mistakes, when the site fails because of a release, it is only for a few minutes because we have scripts to roll-back very quickly. When we release functionality that doesn’t make the lives of our users easier, it is probably in an A/B test so we notice it before the functionality is all over the site. Or when we try to work in a different way together as a team, we normally start with a pilot. Our new feedback system (replacing appraisals) is being trialed with a few teams before everyone uses it. When things go wrong, we don’t react by blaming each other or with other nasty reactions. We evaluate what went wrong and we try to learn, to do a little better the next time. This ensures we are not afraid of failing and since we are not afraid, we dare to change fast and therefore learn fast.

There are more answers to the question on how we manage to grow so fast as an IT team without falling apart, but these are some of the major ones. I hope it is clear that we’re not perfect, nor are we magicians. But we are a talented team, not afraid to talk about the mistakes we make. We’re open to each other and try to work together as well as we can. Our plans for the future? We’ll find another 100 people to join our team. So if you happen to be a great engineer, please take a look at our website CareersatCoolblue.com and who knows, in a few weeks you might be part of one of the greatest IT teams in the Netherlands!

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.

Tech Pets

May 2017, Not long ago I saw someone using ftp, a protocol that is used as long as I can remember to move files, 25 years or so. We started talking about the funny little Fetch (see below), that used to be there, running from the server with the files to the server that was supposed to get them. Just after that I started working on a presentation for my team and since the stuff I needed to tell was a little boring (numbers, they normally don’t like that) I was looking for something to lighten up the story. And what do you do in these circumstances (well at least I do)? Yep, you look on the internet for a funny looking cat, there are plenty. A Tech presentation isn’t complete without a cat on the slides nowadays.

This made me think. In the old days, when internet was not so commonly used, I remember a lot of dogs. Fetch, the ftp dog, when I needed to upload a new version of a website. And Rover, part of the worksuite Microsoft Bob. A little animation that explained you how Windows was working, since they couldn’t get their UX right. And Lycos, one of the first search engines on the internet, also a dog.

What happened? Did cats replace dogs in the Tech World?

Today not only presentations contain cats, also in softwarelogos we find cats. The Github logo is a cat, same for GNUzilla, Icecat, Scratch and many more!

Cats in the IT-world are all over the place now. Why? I wasn’t able to find a good explanation for that, other than as people we just like cats in general. I read some statistics and there are 2 mln videos with cats on you tube, which are viewed 12.000 times on average, the highest average of all categories. Apparently as humans we love to look at cats. And a cat being a practical and cute pet. A perfect combination for a techie, since a cat happily stays home alone as long as you don’t forget to feed it once and a while. Handy when you have a busy job.

Maybe as IT people we used to be in love with dogs, but we grew up and started loving cats instead? My husbands pointed out that already from the beginning the Apple OS X versions had cat-like names (Cheetah, Puma, Jaguar, Panther, Tiger, Leopard, Snow Leopard, Lion, Mountain Lion). Is it the growing Apple influence that we have changed our minds? Or maybe the cat popularity is just a hype that will pass by?

Well, it is a mystery to me. I can’t remember any cat-like software logos or names from 20 years ago. Also I can’t remember cats being as popular on the internet as they are today. If you do, please put it in the comments section of Linkedin! I love to hear more thoughts on this subject.

The WWW? What is it and what can Philips Media do with it?

June 1995. This was the title of my thesis. At the time I wrote it, internet wasn’t commonly used, I was studying Industrial Design at the Technical University of Delft. I was in my 4th year when I took an internship at Philips in Eindhoven. I was working at the CD-i department of Philips (Philips Media). CD-i stood for Compact Disc Interactive and it used to be a competitor of the CD-rom.

Download the report in pdf.