Working at Dexory

Meet the team: Rob, Senior Software Engineer

December 10, 2024

I have been with Dexory for just over a year now. I came from a failing robotics startup working on transforming QSRs (quick service restaurants) into smart kitchens - imagine automated canteens and fryers in the form of robots. When they went under, I found Dexory through an old friend (thanks Richard) who had also worked at the startup. To experience the journey from startup to scaleup with Dexory felt like a natural progression for me, and it has been pretty amazing to say the least.

I sit within the Platform tribe where I work on full-stack development for our internal applications, primarily focusing on two key projects: Robot Manager and Fleet Manager.

The Robot Manager runs directly on the robot and provides tooling to configure and manage the robot's general operations. This includes anything from scheduling when the robots should scan the warehouses, to configuring the camera hardware. Speaking of cameras, you can even see a live video feed through Robot Manager and drive the robot around with a joystick like a video game which is pretty fun.

Fleet Manager is a web app that (lo and behold) helps us manage the entire fleet. This is super important as we start to scale to hundreds of robots, as it gives us a better overview of monitoring performance across the entire fleet, as well as supporting routine tasks like software releases.

What's the most interesting or unexpected thing you've learned since joining this company?

I recently learned about Euler angles and Quaternions (basically methods to represent the orientation or rotation of objects in three-dimensional space). I was never good at math (still not now) and I was happy to see the back of it after school, so I was very surprised that not only was I learning this stuff but I was also enjoying it. It’s funny when you only see the point in learning certain things when you see how they can be applied to real-world applications.

What exciting projects is your team currently working on, and how can new hires contribute to those initiatives?

I’ve been really enjoying working on Fleet Manager just because this is the one we never got around to building in my previous company. You get some really great insights when capturing data from all the robots. We built this map feature where you can see all our robots marked on a world map, which is just a cool way to see how we’re expanding across different markets.

We’re hiring now because our time is a bit split across other important projects, so it would be great to keep the momentum going for this particular product to keep developing it to its full potential.

What's the best team-building activity or event you've participated in at the company?

It has to be the 2 days we spent at a spa hotel in the Cotswolds. People could get massages, relax in the spa, or go kayaking at this nearby lake with these crazy death slides. It was just a great time for everyone to unwind, meet others they hadn’t met before, and enjoy some well-earned downtime after all the hard work that was put in towards driving the company mission.

If you could have a superpower that would help you excel at work, what would it be and why?

I’d probably get mental capabilities (superhuman computers for non-Dune fans), so that I can do everything in my head, and then I wouldn’t need to use Excel (terrible joke, but I am a dad of two). Seriously though, I would be a mental.