Alex Howells spawned as a Senior Operations Engineer with LivingSocial, where he focuses on infrastructure problems involving deployment and automation of infrastructure, with heavy emphasis on OpenStack and Opscode Chef. In previous lives before being shot in the head by a railgun-wielding recruiter he played Lead Systems Architect for HP Cloud Services, and Infrastructure Architect for HP Labs.

Work-related areas of interest include provisioning datacenters worth of hardware, automating and instrumenting all of the things, and then using all that data to make things faster, easier or cheaper (pick any two).

Outside of work he owns a spaniel, reads a lot of books, and laments the fact British Airways doesn't have internet connectivity on transatlantic flights yet.