Alan (on the left) has developed with Java at companies ranging from Cisco to a 'pokey wee music company that never paid anyone’, before joining NCR in February 2015 as a software engineer in Mobile Banking. He describes the Edinburgh Centre of Excellence as ‘eponymous’, enjoying the dedicated technical culture, the opportunities for personal development, free breakfasts and using the coffee machine to avoid high blood levels in his caffeine system.
Alan is particularly enthusiastic about (finally!) having the chance to work in a true Agile environment, after years being stuck in a barrel going over Waterfall development – not to mention getting his hands on lots of modern shiny technologies and frameworks. He also maintains a strong personal interest in AI, particularly in the theories and technologies underpinning multi-agent systems, compositional behaviour and distributed planning.
His favourite part of working in Edinburgh is being in the cosmopolitan centre of Scotland, combined with a sentimental attachment to the castle where he married his wife. Not THAT castle, though, but the nicer, ruined one in Craigmillar.
In his spare time, when not tinkering around with programming or wasting time with the usual multimedia culprits, Alan mostly occupies himself by playing with his daughter, visiting various castles around Scotland, and occasional international trips. He once read A Brief History of Time, although he didn’t understand much of it.