CategoryMisc.

30 January 2017

Hamburgers and 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. 😉

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20 December 2016

What a PHP developer says he does.

Birthday parties. That fun time for awkward conversations with your fellow ‘we-are-here-for-whatshisface’ partygoers. And it won’t take long before someone asks you: “so, what is it you actually do?” Our PHP Developer always has a foolproof explanation. We asked our PHP Developer, Sander, to answer a few questions that we’re likely to ask him at a party. Maybe we’ll even find out where he buys his birthday presents for a cat.
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Picture from Velocity 2015
3 December 2015

TBT: Velocity October 2015

Together with my colleagues from Coolblue I visited the Velocity 2015 conference this October in Amsterdam. Velocity is a yearly event about web operations, end-to-end optimisations, ubiquitous delivery and performance. This year the theme was ‘build resilient systems at scale’. As you can imagine this is pretty relevant topic for a fast growing company like Coolblue :).
It was a great and useful conference, I liked it a lot. O’Reilly organises the conference and they always do a great job in making the slide decks available. You can find them all here. Going through all the presentations will take you quite some time. So here are a few of my favorite topics and talks.

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12 November 2015

The decision roundtable

Coolblue is a flat organisation which is growing very fast, the IT development department is growing even faster. This makes it harder and harder to involve everybody in decision making, something that we value as really important. So, in order to support this process, especially regarding our ever growing code base, we introduced the decision roundtable. The decision roundtable turns out to be highly effective and resulted in the team taking full ownership of their code base. So, after using it for more than half a year now it’s time to share our experience. Continue reading

27 July 2015

Office life at Coolblue

Dutch IT news website Tweakers.net asked its community what the ideal workplace should look like. The results didn’t surprise us. Fast computers, plenty of screen real estate, good coffee and great colleagues are just a few of the things that we consider the bare essentials for a day at the office. In fact, when asked what employers they’d expect to check these boxes, we ranked number 2 – just below Google… We blame it on our lack of slides in the office. Read on for a look at what office life at Coolblue is like!

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