After studying Mechanical Engineering followed by Computer Science at university in Edinburgh, Alex started his career as a software engineer and vibration analyst in the aerospace industry. He worked for HGL Dynamics and was subcontracted into Rolls Royce as a vibration expert. Alex led the redevelopment of the entire HGL analysis suite of applications as well as negotiating, specifying and managing the delivery of a condition monitoring and proactive maintenance system that operates on all turbine-powered Royal Navy surface ships. After joining Ocado in 2010, Alex worked as project manager delivering a second generation, highly efficient goods-to-person picking system that has been deployed in the company's Hatfield and Dordon fulfilment centres. Alex is now head of robotics and autonomous systems department, where his wide-ranging responsibilities include the technology development of Ocado’s proprietary warehousing automation and overseeing teams of researchers in robotics, 3D vision, simulation and 3D visualisation. In his spare time he likes to hike up Munroe’s in Scotland and spend as much time outdoors with his family.
Talk : Logistics as a Service: Building the Ocado Smart Platform
Other talks from track Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Last Year's Tracks
Monday, 5 March
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Leading Edge Backend Languages
Code the future! How cutting-edge programming languages and their more-established forerunners can help solve today and tomorrow’s server-side technical problems.
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Security: Red XOR Blue Team
Security from the defender's AND the attacker's point of view
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Microservices/ Serverless: Patterns and Practices
Stories of success and failure building modern service and function-based applications, including event sourcing, reactive, decomposition, & more.
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Stream Processing in the Modern Age
Compelling applications of stream processing & recent advances in the field
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DevEx: The Next Evolution of DevOps
Removing friction from the developer experience.
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Modern CS in the Real World
Applied trends in Computer Science that are likely to affect Software Engineers today.
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Speaker AMAs (Ask Me Anything)
Tuesday, 6 March
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Next Gen Banking: It’s not all Blockchains and ICOs
Great technologies like Blockchain, smartphones and biometrics must not be limited to just faster banking, but better banking.
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Observability: Logging, Alerting and Tracing
Observability in modern large distributed computer systems
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Building Great Engineering Cultures & Organizations
Stories of cultural change in organizations
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Architectures You've Always Wondered About
Topics like next-gen architecture mixed with applied use cases found in today's large-scale systems, self-driving cars, network routing, scale, robotics, cloud deployments, and more.
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The Practice & Frontiers of AI
Learn about machine learning in practice and on the horizon
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JavaScript and Beyond: The Future of the Frontend
Exploring the great frontend frameworks that make JavaScript so popular and theg JavaScript-based languages revolutionising frontend development.
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Speaker AMAs (Ask Me Anything)
Wednesday, 7 March
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Distributed Stateful Systems
Architecting and leveraging NoSQL revisitied
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Operating Systems: LinuxKit, Unikernels, & Beyond
Applied, practical, & real-world deep-dive into industry adoption of OS, containers and virtualisation, including Linux on Windows, LinuxKit, and Unikernels
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Architecting for Failure
If you're not architecting for failure you're heading for failure
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Evolving Java and the JVM: Mobile, Micro and Modular
Although the Java language is holding strong as a developer favourite, new languages and paradigms are being embraced on JVM.
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Tech Ethics in Action
Learning from the experiences of real-world companies driving technology decisions from ethics as much as technology.
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Bare Knuckle Performance
Killing latency and getting the most out of your hardware
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Speaker AMAs (Ask Me Anything)