18 October 2021 3 min

Spaces Summit 2020 goes digital

Giving back to the tech community

At the end of May, the fourth (and first digital) edition of bol.com’s Spaces Summit took place. A two-day internal conference in which our colleagues take the stage to talk about interesting topics within IT and share their passion and knowledge with their fellow friends and colleagues. In this blogpost Kevin and Marvin, speaker and spectator, talk about the first digital edition.

Taking the stage & giving back to the tech community

Kevin van den Broek, Young Professional and Software Engineer, joined bol.com in September 2019. “I was looking at all kinds of different tech companies and saw bol.com. I noticed that they had all kinds of tech content, like these blogs for example! But my eye also caught an event called “Spaces Summit’. After watching the videos on YouTube about the event, I got really excited. It shows that there are a lot of Software Engineers within bol.com, that value knowledge sharing, like I do.”

A lot of Software Engineers within bol.com value knowledge sharing, like I do

Fintech bol.com

The developer’s toolset for Kubernetes

This brings us to Spaces Summit 2020. Kevin was always fond of presenting technical topics, because that’s his way of giving something back to the tech community at bol.com. He wanted to share his knowledge and that brought him to his topic Kubernetes (k8s). “Kubernetes is what we within bol.com use to orchestrate our Cloud applications. In my spare time and in the YP program of bol.com I wanted to learn and know everything about Kubernetes to be confident enough with maintaining our cloud applications. In our community chatroom, I noticed this is a topic a lot of people want to know more about. And so my presentation was born “The developer’s toolset for Kubernetes.”

In his talk, Kevin guides you through topics that make you more confident in your daily Kubernetes operations. “So, with Kubernetes being a container orchestrator, doing all the tasks like providing resources, scheduling containers and scaling your deployment, what do we need to know, to become more confident in our operations?

  • We’ll see how our deployment is split up into components.
  • The multiple things pods do.
  • What you need to do, when you want to deploy the application container.
  • We’ll talk about probes.
  • What you’ll do after writing Deployment Specifications.
  • Other interesting elements that are very important with deployments in k8s such as Pod Anti Affinity and Pod Disruption Budgets.
  • And we’ll discuss different useful (kubectl) commands and other tooling.”

There’s a first for everything the digital edition

The idea of Spaces Summit started four years ago with drinks and friends. In this fourth online edition, bol.com still wanted to create that friendly vibe where people come together to talk about the same interests and to inspire each other. That’s pretty hard when it’s online but looking at the numbers of people who attended the talks, we didn’t do so bad this year. We can proudly say, that this was another successful Spaces Summit. We had 28 tech talks in total, one of which had 240 attendees. How cool is that! On the side channel, Google Chat, everybody could talk and discuss the topics, which was used by 266 of our engineers.

Want to know more about the Spaces Summit and how it went digitally

Spectator

Marvin Zwolsman, also a Young Professional and Software Engineer, was one of the attendees at the Spaces Summit. It was his second time already and attended Kevin’s talk:

“The cloud is a bit of a pain if you don’t really know how it works and what’s going on. Kevin joined bol.com about a year ago and it already feels like he’s the ‘cloud guru’ around here. In his talk, you feel how passionate he is about sharing his knowledge, his work, and Kubernetes. He talked about the fine details on how Kubernetes works, and how our managed cloud works. It was such valuable information and it helps a lot of people. That’s also the power of the Spaces Summit. We share the knowledge that is so valuable because it helps you further in your work. I think it should happen more often, it’s so important.”

I always like to listen to Leon. He has great energy and a fun personality. He started the day, so definitely a jump-start.

Young professional bol.com

Marvin also mentions other talks of colleagues that touch topics like monitoring, functional programming, and component-based architecture that were very valuable for him. “Even though this first digital edition wasn’t as vibrant as last year, it was still an overall good experience with a lot of nice information. One thing I missed: the drinks afterwards!”

“To summarize Spaces Summit this year: Interesting topics, good speakers, and even better discussions!”

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