Meet the team — Piers Williams — Software Engineer

In our weekly feature interviewing members of Redgates Product Development teams, we managed to grab a quick chat with Piers.

Piers is one of our engineers in our SQL Monitor team and tells us about an ingenious alarm clock of the furry kind and the motto he lives his life by.

1. Your name and role? — Piers Williams, Software Engineer
2. How long have you done this, what did you do before? — Since September 2018 — before I was a university student
3. How did you become a software engineer? — Applied for it, interviewed etc — this is my first role at Red-gate
4. What sort of things did you do to prepare you for the role? — Spent most of my preparation looking at SQL by building a database to keep track of my upcoming wedding. Rest of my preparation included learning some C# as it had been some years since I had last used C# and was mostly a Java developer at university
5. Did you always know you wanted to become a software engineer? — No — I was mostly intending to become a lecturer at university but working with them made me realize it is a job with some really terrible working practices. Red-gate looked like a great and happy place to work.
6. What’s the thing that gets you out of bed in the morning? — Currently my dog (Literally kicks me out of bed some mornings) — but mostly I enjoy being able to work on tough problems that help our customers achieve what they need.
7. What’s the thing that makes you want to put the alarm on snooze? — Bugs in complex, and difficult parts of the code. Some bits of the codebase haven’t been changed in years, and it can be really difficult to work out what is going on there.
8. What one piece of advice would you give to someone seeking to do your role? — Maintain standards and test — nothing worse than finding a bug that a test should have been able to catch.
9. Best advice to give to someone looking to join Redgate? —Technical skill is important but there is more to it than that here. As a developer we interact with customers, sales people, and support so team work and communication is important.
10. Where do you see Redgate in 5 years’ time? — Hopefully making real inroads into the enterprise space and getting its great products into more people’s hands
11. What’s the motto you live by? — Leave it better than you found it — not surprising as I have been a Scout most of my life
12. Describe what Ingeniously Simple means to you? — Just works, the principle of least astonishment really. Needs to be so obvious that instructions are superfluous and support is for when it is broken only.