Rogier
Lommers Principal Tech Lead @ bol.com

bol.com: Principal Tech Lead

2023 - Present

Responsible for leading the process to create and keep an environment where people become empowered. anticipate dependencies, figure out unknowns, plan before, plan on the go, and revisit afterward. By understanding business risks and requirements and accurately translating them into solutions and projects, I help the buying domain at bol.com to move forward. My goal is to have holistic knowledge of the products within my domain: their design and relationships with each other and the company's overall architecture. It's also equally important to help the team evolve their products over time in a maintainable, scalable way.

Highlights:

• Drive the development and realisation of our enterprise technology vision and architecture. This includes the actual implementation of architecture as code and everything related to that.
• Finding the optimal balance between systems (tightly coupled landscape of >1500 microservices), structure (high number of dependencies between teams) and data (data management practices). In other words: working on modularity.
• Company-wide implementation of distributed tracing.
• Leading project "future of testing", where we re-design our testing strategy in the cloud.
• Introduction of our tech radar. It reduces complexity by deriving insights from our technological landscape and it supports choosing the right technologies for future projects.

bol.com: Space Tech Lead

2020 - 2023

As a space tech lead, my focus is on the bol.com wide technical initiatives. I am responsible for leading and helping the product tech leads with the implementation of these initiatives. I am working on defining new horizontal (technical) initiatives across the whole organization.

Highlights:

• Part of the project team who is responsible to have an overall tech vision that helps teams and domains to establish direction. More info: tech-vision at bol.com.
• Helping the product tech leads with the development and implementation of horizontal topics like SRE (site reliability engineering), API-developments etc.
• Coaching the product tech leads in their role.
• Play an active role in the tech lead community and as such a connecting role between spaces
• Together with the community I spot, define and help to start the next horizontal initiatives that will help bol.com grow.
• I advise and support the space MT on technical/engineering challenges.

Presentations / podcast appearances:

• 2022 | Club Cloud - bol.com moving 100+ teams and it's 1K+ applications to the cloud / 3 unforeseen challenges (link).
• 2021 | Beyond Coding: moving from an on-premise solution to the cloud might be the biggest change an organization can go through, with regards to their tech landscape: link (direct youtube link).
• 2021 | Techlab: a discussion about how to maximise the benefits of the cloud by using the horizontal pod autoscaler: Maximize cloud benefits.
• 2020 | CodeKlets podcast: Rogier Lommers en Kevin van den Broek over werken bij Bol.com.

bol.com: Software Architect

2015 - 2020

Software architect / cloud liaison. Helping multidisciplinary teams to get most out of the cloud (Google Cloud Platform). Keywords are application development, migration from own datacenter to GCP, horizontal scalability, cloud-component selection, kubernetes, educating the Go language, etc.

Highlights:

• Lead of assets team. We are responsible for the complete flow of assets, from sourcing (external) to publishing. This includes image deduplication based on perceptual hashing, automated scoring, matching and high-volume rendering (both java/spring and Golang services).
• Technical design and implementation of several micro services (image renderer, fetcher). This includes storage selection (both Google Cloud platform and own datacenter), provisioning, metrics, logging, etc.
• Hadoop-dumper project: an easy way to dump data from Golang applications to a hadoop cluster.
• Creator of Miracle: distributed processing by colleagues. Thinking out-of-the-box, what to do when you need a lot of hardware for a short period? Making use of your colleages laptops. More info: techlab.

Presentations / podcast appearances:

• A story about distributed computing before the cloud arrived (Godays 2020, Berlin).
• How we moved our asset pipeline to the cloud (NMGN.tech).
• Techlab: Redesign for the cloud, corresponding presentation: Re-design for the cloud: a real life example of horizontal scaling (for the bol.com spaces summit 2019).
• Podcast: from zero to Go.

bol.com: Software Engineer / developer

2011 - 2015

Software Engineer working on a variety of projects.

Highlights:

• Connect supplier catalog files using Talend Data Integration and BigData edition. Responsible for the migration to a fully open-sourced license model. Setting up continuous integration, automated builds, etc.
• Writing services for digital asset management, using Oracle AQ, java, spring, maven and REST.
• Content Improvement: using scalability of Apache Hadoop to optimize product enrichment (map/reduce, pig and hive).

Ordina: Integration consultant

2008 - 2010

Worked as an integration consultant on both internal and external projects.

Highlights:

• Philips: worked in a software development team with a primary focus to develop software for measuring NPS scores (2008-2010).
• bol.com: orked as a business analist in translation functional needs to technical designs. We developed a generic framework which is used for daily content deliveries (2010-2011).

BI4U: Writing Master Thesis

2007-2008

"A scientific approach to Operational Management". Improving business processes by using data mining techniques. Supervisor: prof.dr.ir. Th.P. (Theo) van der Weide.

Edisoft Portugal: Internship

2003

As part of my Bachelor degree I worked as an intern at Edisoft (a company in Lisbon) with two other students. We developed a tool which enabled offline usage of content out of an Oracle database, including the sync-back mechanism. Used stack: Oracle pl/sql, PHP, XML.

Co-founder of playlist-exchange.com

2022 - Present

You're on Spotify, but your friend is on Apple Music? Playlist Exchange helps you share your playlists and songs, independent of the music service you or your friends use. More information available at https://playlist-exchange.com/.

Creator of open-source (Golang) logrus package

2018

Creator of open-source project which contains a hook for the Golang logrus package. This enables logging to a RELK stack (Redis, Elasticsearch, Logstash and Kibana). More information about this project can be found on github: github.com/rogierlommers/logrus-redis-hook.