Last week, the Hackatrain took place in Berlin. Over the span of two days, 17 teams worked on challenges related to autonomous vehicles whereafter they visited the Tech Open Air festival.

On the first of July we hopped on the train with a team of five engineers and designers both from ING and FINN : The Autonomous Lions. Our journey was supported by six mentors and colleagues from both companies. Within a day and a half our team worked out a business plan, ironed out a MVP and demonstrated a prototype. The hackathon ended as usual: with a pitch in…

As part of my job as IT Chapter Lead at ING, I am responsible for the ‘mastery’ of my chapter members. What that means is that I need to make sure they are basically on top of their game, and keep growing (in the direction they want!).

I do most of this via one-on-one meetings. I quickly realized around me that a large portion of my colleagues do not go to Meetups, and do not do any programming at home. That’s of course ok, but coming from small companies where everyone was very passionate I didn’t expect it. However, I…

For this first post, I am glad to be able to present to you a library we developed internally: Baker is an open-source Scala library that reduces the effort to develop orchestration logic in APIs to one third compared to traditional approaches.

Reducing the orchestration logic

Baker was built for a specific use case: individuals becoming customers of ING (customer on-boarding) via the mobile app of ING. The supporting API had to meet the following requirements:

• Implement a process flow of more than twenty steps;
• Steps spanning over an incredibly complex system landscape, evolved over tens of years and twelve separate systems of record;
• …