The Rio Olympics are in full swing, giving the world an inside view of Brazilian culture and history. For those of us watching on TV, the feeling of saudade is present. As is quickly becoming customary, I've pulled together another set of relevant thought pieces, news stories, and tips & tricks from the past week. Enjoy!

Industry

• Speaking of the Olympics, many retailers are seeing strong spikes in apparel sales, including Fanatics who says they're up 50% compared to the 2012 London Olympics. E-Retailers Go For the Summer Olympics Gold [Internet Retailer]

• After a week of speculation, it seems as if the deal will go through between Walmart and Jet.com, which would be the largest acquisition of an e-commerce company ever. Stated to be announced today, potentially before this email arrives. Walmart is buying Jet.com for $3 billion and will announce the deal on Monday [Recode]

Culture

• Agile is a practice where you only get out what you put into it. Gary Spillman gives fantastic (and entertaining) advice on how best to extract value from retros. Don’t Look Back in Anger: Retrospectives, Software Development and How Your Team Can Improve [BazaarVoice]

• As more companies look to DevOps practices as a way to deliver software quicker and more effectively, it’s important to look at the whole picture, not just individual teams. What happens when product and service teams need to collaborate with each other? App dev silos are DevOps killers: Start by tearing them down [TechBeacon]

Technology

• Many of us who follow the container ecosystem closely witnessed quite the debate on Twitter last week. The tl;dr of it boils down to the right balance between industry standards and continued innovation. Joab Jackson breaks it down. Container Format Dispute on Twitter Shows Disparities Between Docker and the Community [The New Stack]

• Despite the clear benefits, nobody claimed microservices to be an easier path towards developing large scale applications. If we're meant to be strict with our bounded contexts, what do we do when we actually want to share data between services? Christian Posta dives in using the often used airline ticketing example. The Hardest Part About Microservices: Your Data [Christian Posta]

Experience

• Designers can benefit from optimization just as developers do. Duval Nicolas shares some personal advice around creating a shared library of components for rapid iterations and consistent output. Dare I say DRY design? Stop designing interfaces, Start designing experiences [Medium]

• Your weekly reminder that user experience is about just that - the experience. Nik Page digs into the business implications of UI/UX, with a few retail cases. UX Strategy – It Is All About The Experience [Usability Geek]