Meet the team — Ellie Fuller — Software Engineer

As part of our weekly series of blog posts we catch up with members of Redgate’s Product Development department.

This week we spoke to Ellie. Ellie has been a software engineer at Redgate for the last 11 months.

Your name and role

My name is Ellie Fuller, and I currently work as a Software Engineer on the Versioning and Automation team here at Redgate. More specifically, I’m working on an add-on for Sql Server Management Studio which will help Database engineers automate their deployment process.

How long have you done this, what did you do before?

I started my Software Engineering career 11 months ago, having just graduated from Sheffield Hallam University in Computer Science. During my studies, I took a year out to work for a software company called Cimlogic up in Bradford, who specialize in Manufacturing Execution Solutions consultancy.

What sort of things did you do to prepare you for the role?

Having just graduated, I revisited some University content coupled with practicing typical interview questions, in particular soft skills. Completing some of the katas on Project Euler and Codewars helped my problem solving and coding practice in C#.

Did you always know you wanted to do your role?

Not at all. It started out with me wanting to pursue Maths at University; I’ve always enjoyed Maths and problem solving, but the career paths that I could take didn’t entice me enough. I chose to do Computing A-Levels to learn something entirely new to me, and that’s when I decided this is what I want to do for a living — programming.

What’s the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning?

For me, it’s the people at work that make the workday more enjoyable. I feel it’s important to build good relationships with your colleagues, and even friendships. One of our values here at Redgate is “Don’t be an a**hole” and it’s a good value to have! It tends to filter out intolerable behavior, creating a friendly welcoming environment for us all to be in — in turn, I really think it boosts work productivity when there are no conflicts within the team.

What’s the thing that makes you want to put the alarm on snooze?

When I don’t know what I’ll be doing for the day. Knowing I have work assigned for me to do motivates me to get out of bed and get on with it. The times when there isn’t much work for me to do, I start losing my enthusiasm. I always like to keep myself busy.

What one piece of advice would you give to someone seeking to do your role?

That it’s ok not to be Database DevOps tech-savvy! It’s very overwhelming at first at a graduate-level role — this was all completely new to me. My advice would be to stick at it and remember you’re not expected to know everything, you’re also here to learn.

Describe what Ingeniously Simple means to you.

Ingeniously Simple to me means something that is actually quite complex underneath, but the layer you can see and interact with is so incredibly simple to use. I guess it’s quite deceptive!