Alex de Groot
Technology, Teams & Outcomes
's-Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands
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Alex de Groot has spent more than 20 years building software, designing systems, and leading engineering teams of 25 to more than 400 engineers. He has lived through Agile, DevOps, cloud, platform engineering, and now AI, and has learned that every generation brings new tools, but many of the same challenges.
Alex is passionate about both technology and people. He enjoys diving into topics such as serverless databases, software architecture, cloud platforms, and AI, while also helping teams work better together and deliver more value to customers.
His work focuses on a simple question: how do we make engineering teams more effective without making work more complicated?
As a regular conference speaker, Alex shares practical stories, lessons learned, and the occasional scar from two decades of building and scaling software organizations.
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Rethinking (AI) databases... let's go serverless all the way!
For years we have accepted the position of databases in your infrastructure / cloud landscape: our big solid but expensive heart of our precious application. While the economy started to cool down, some interesting happened... We started to look at our bill again How can it make sense that my high traffic (serverless) application runs for 5 euros a month and my databases costs me 1200 euros? Can't we do this cheaper?
The database vendors responded and many innovations are hitting the market currently. Let us look at infinite scaling options, branch schema's, new data storage patterns and optimized compute. As a bonus, let's look how this all positively affects the AI use-cases.
Depending on the audience and the conference, this talk can be delivered showcasing other cloud+database-vendors / implementation technologies.
AI Doesn't Scale & What You Can Do About It
About twelve years ago, Dan North shook up the software community with the claim that Agile doesn't scale. A decade later, we find ourselves facing a remarkably similar problem: AI doesn't scale either.
We've moved from deploying software a few times a year to deploying multiple times a day. Now AI promises another leap in productivity. Yet many organizations still struggle to translate that productivity into lasting customer value.
The latest manifestation comes in many forms: spec-driven development, AI-native development, agentic software engineering, and whatever the next certification body decides to call it. The terminology changes, but the underlying challenge remains the same.
Scaling technology is easy.
Speeding up coding is easy.
Scaling outcomes is hard.
And when the expected results fail to materialize, the blame inevitably lands with the engineers.
In this talk, I'll explore the uncomfortable questions that most AI vendors would rather avoid. Why do AI initiatives stall after the first project? Why do productivity gains in coding fail to translate into business outcomes? How do you scale success beyond a handful of AI enthusiasts and 10x engineers? And what actually creates sustainable competitive advantage?
The answer has far less to do with the latest AI model or Copilot feature than most people think. Long-term success depends on maintenance, craftsmanship, organizational design, and our ability to continuously discover and deliver customer value.
This talk is about what happens after the AI honeymoon ends. It's Monday morning, it's raining, and despite all the AI productivity gains, customers are still leaving.
Future Tech 2022 Sessionize Event
DevSum 2022 Sessionize Event
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