red@work

PASS Potpourri

red@work — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 01:01:00 GMT

Our expert team of conference-goers recently got back from PASS, and laughed in the face of jet-lag to fill us in on a varied taste of what went on during these last few non-stop days in Seattle. I’ll open to floor to the lovely Claire, who reminisces about the good times…

The SQL Server Central party, complete with SQL-fuelled, happy website members, buzzing casino tables, purple nachos and a mountain of charcoal gray T-shirts to give away, surely has to be one of my favourite evenings during PASS.

My attempts at blackjack were all too reminiscent of the days when I used to play (and bitterly lose) POGS in the yard at school. The chips may have practically dissolved on the green felt of the table before me, but my spirits were greatly lifted when we all saw Dan McClain, Exceptional DBA of 2008, accept his trophy, awarded by Rodney Landrum and Brad McGehee, two of the Exceptional DBA Awards' judges. Rodney, Dan and Brad all made great speeches, and, cheesy as it may sound, I really enjoyed seeing Dan's peers cheer his achievement, particularly as there will probably have been quite a few people at the party who voted for the awards' finalists. Dan has worked hard in his career, and I'm sure Dan encouraged many DBAs in the audience to enter these new awards in their second year in 2009 too.

Here's a photo of Dan with his crystal trophy – Dan, if you're reading this, I hope the baggage handlers at the airports were gentle!

Next up, we've got the inestimable Theo, and his rapid-fire round-up of preparing for software demonstrations…

Software folklore dictates that the best way to find bugs in your software is to prepare a thoroughly checked and rehearsed demonstration and then try to reproduce it with a customer watching. Fortunately all Red Gate software is scrutinized by our rather thorough testing department before being released, but even without software bugs there is a lot that can go wrong.

Due to our unshakable faith in Murphey’s Law, the Red Gate PASS team spent the day before PASS sitting on all available surfaces in our apartment with laptops balanced precariously on our laps working on our demonstrations. Questions were raised like “How do you demonstrate SQL Prompt if you haven’t written any SQL in the last 3 years?” (solved with a crash-course SQL refresher) and “How do you demonstrate a server monitoring tool on a single laptop without an internet connection?” (Daniel had set up an appropriate virtual machine before we left for the conference).

Whilst the preparation was somewhat painful, it meant at the conference demonstrating the software went smoothly (most of the time anyway). Careful practice helped, but much of the credit for this must go to Dom for designing interfaces that even guys like me from marketing can learn to use fluently in less than a day.

And last, but by no means the least, I present our very own Tony, and his tale of Seattle Surreality...

Sometimes weird things happen at conferences. After a long day in technical sessions, followed by the vendor reception, I was looking forward to winding down with a burger and a quiet few beers. I really did not expect to find myself, instead, taking photos in a Seattle tattoo parlour at 10PM, as Rodney Landrum got what must surely be the world's first Red Gate tattoo.

I think this was a "one off" PASS experience ;)

Post by Chris Massey, Claire Brooking, Theo Spears & Tony Davis

Red Gate's first Blood Brother

red@work — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 22:58:00 GMT

Being a Community Marketeer can be a tough road some days, but I think the highlight of my career arrived in my inbox today.

We like to show love for our friends … and this friend returned the passion in spades, and permanent spades at that!

Rodney Landrum, you truly are Red Gate's first blood brother.

Posted by Rachel

It Takes a Crazy to Recognise a Crazy

red@work — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 18:22:52 GMT

Red Gate recently attended the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, CA, and when we weren’t consuming copious numbers of oysters and steaks, we found a lot of time to chat to attendees. I always seem to find myself having similar conversations with people during the course of a week. No bad thing of course, but it definitely means that the more interesting conversations always stand out.

The one that most definitely stood out for all of us was Joey deVilla. A Developer Evangelist for Microsoft Canada, Joey regaled us with some sweet, sweet music on his … accordion. To be precise, Joey serenaded a rather dazed and confused crowd around the Red Gate booth with a particularly unique version of Britney Spears debut single ‘… Baby One More Time’.

Alice could hardly contain herself, so we had to get a picture to remind ourselves of the musical masterpiece. As the saying goes, it definitely takes one to know one, and in this case it just had to be our very own Red Gate crazy that picked out another crazy from a crowd of thousands!

Joey deVilla, his accordion and Alice Easey at the Microsoft PDC

It’s worth noting that according to Joey’s business cards he will ‘play for beer’. I hope Alice kept his card. I think I might find out if he’s free for my birthday next year during Microsoft TechEd Developers …

Post by Rachel.

Female developers, we need you!

red@work — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:21:00 GMT

Where are the female developers? The development department have some very talented technical testers who happen to be women, and are used to programming test harnesses and debugging applications. We also have female project managers, product managers, technical writers and usability specialists - but no developers. I went along to a girl geek dinner with a colleague in October and, given that women already play a significant role in product development at Red Gate, I was wondering why I keep thinking it would be so cool to hire a female developer.

At the event, Dr Elizabeth Kelan from the Lehmen Brothers Centre for Women in Business presented her research into gender proportions on teams in the workplace (among other things). The premise was that innovation is foremost in making organisations successful, and so businesses should strive to create teams which maximise innovation.

“In companies around the world, executives are putting the capacity for innovation top of their strategic agenda. At the heart of the innovation strategy are people prepared and able to work collaboratively in teams, and to exchange and synthesise knowledge from many different sources”[1]

She talked us through factors which drive innovation, including experimentation, efficiency, task performance, self-confidence, psychological safety and knowledge transfer. And it turns out teams with a 50/50 split between men and women will be the ones most prominently displaying the drivers for innovation (and the speed of innovation). While some of her graphs only showed marginal benefits in each criteria for these 50/50 teams, when these are all added together the overall benefit is compelling!

The basis for the research is pretty impressive - they collected data from over 100 companies in various industries, with varying team sizes and teams with different balances of men and women. It still caused some interesting debate in a room full of girl geeks, and gave insights into how some of them feel when they are a minority. One woman described how she instinctively clears up coffee cups after a meeting, and then worries if the serious technical issues she’d raised would somehow be invalidated by her attention to domestic tasks. Women also expressed how they felt they had to prove their geekiness in a technical environment by openly out-smarting their male colleagues, and even covering up ‘girliness’ to fit it with the guy geeks. On the whole, it was agreed that there are negative outcomes when either gender are in a minority. The study even suggested findings such as lower life satisfaction, negative moods and decreased commitment to a company in those imbalanced situations.

Thankfully, the feeling of being in a gender minority hasn’t been raised as a concern with women working here. But maybe that’s because there are already several women in the development department, in roles other than software engineering, and overall there’s a supportive culture where everyone has a voice. If we do ever employ a female developer, or indeed manage to create a team with a balance of genders, at least we know they’ll be at the peak of innovation!

What are your experiences of working on development teams with different gender proportions?

Post by Helen Joyce

[1] From http://www.london.edu/assets/documents/Word/Innovative_Potential_NOV_2007.pdf

Introducing your PDC 2008 team...

red@work — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 23:34:00 GMT

Microsoft PDC is upon us again for the first time in three years. There is a packed 5-day agenda running from Sunday October 26^th through to Thursday October 30^th.

I always get excited about going away with Red Gate. It’s such a big change from the work that we all do in the office. Much as I like being in contact with people overseas I can’t help but relish the time away from my PC. The chance to meet so many new people, and the opportunity to catch up with people that we only get to see face-to-face maybe once a year at most is really refreshing for developers, tester, sales and marketing alike.

I wanted to take a minute to introduce you to the Red Gate team that will be jetting over to Los Angeles, CA to get involved in the action next week, and to encourage you to come and talk to us!

First up is our beloved Head of Development, Tom Harris. Tom was the third Red Gate employee, which means he’s been with the company for nine years! He was the brains behind the original version of ANTS Profiler and has since turned his hand to Mixology – the art of cocktail creation. He is a mojito connoisseur and will leave LA knowing where to go to find the best one.

Second in line is Alice Easey, Test Engineer Extraordinaire and subject of the best staff photo on our company intranet. Alice has a plethora of interesting jobs on her CV, the highlight for me being a muse for a comics’ artiste … dressed up as a dinosaur. Brilliant.

Next we have one of my favourite sales people, Angus Chudleigh. Angus takes care of the Northern regions of the United States, so if you’re based in Vermont you may well have been in touch with him. A keen golfer and wine-lover (although not before tee-time!), he used to work as a Deputy Manciple (wine steward) for a Cambridge University college. If you’ve got any Californian recommendations for him, stop by the booth and make his day.

Charles Brown joined Red Gate as a Product Manager earlier this year. If you ever want to relax with a cup of tea and the crossword from the Guardian newspaper, make sure you are there before Charles and the rest of the Product Management team. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve narrowly missed the opportunity to exercise my cerebral capacities because I was too slow! The upsetting part is, he only uses the crossword to warm up his synapses before moving on to the cryptic crossword!

For all those motorcycle enthusiasts at PDC, you’ll find a friend in Greg Tillman our .NET Sales team leader. One of Greg’s most prized possessions is his Suzuki GSXR 600 (apparently the ‘600’ makes all the difference!). Greg is going to be taking a road trip to visit a few of the sights around California and Nevada after the conference. If you have any top tips drop by and let him know.

Ben Hall is one of our SQL tools project leads, and like all true developers and Simple Talk authors, he is a big fan of beer. He was awarded his C# MVP status on July 2nd 2008 for "extraordinary efforts in Visual C# technical communities during the past year." Pretty impressive. But when you bear in mind that Ben lives, eats and breathes software development it’s difficult to see why he wasn’t nominated sooner!

Finally there’s me. I’m Rachel, and I am responsible for community marketing at Red Gate, which is a corporate way of saying I look after Red Gate’s presence at conferences and community events. Resident gossip queen and purveyor of more than one embarrassing trade show photograph of Red Gate staff, I’ll be the one on the stand who can’t stop talking and would very much like you to stop by for a chat.

The Red Gate PDC team will be at booth numbers 410 and 412. Let us know if you’re going to be there and leave us your messages below.

We’re looking forward to seeing you!

Being a gorilla rocks

red@work — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 16:16:00 GMT

And I should know... I was a g’rilla back in 2006 and it was beyond brilliant.

I even got a medal for it.

So when it came to 2008, I was already getting itchy elbows to become a g’rilla again. There’s nothing quite like that feeling of fur against skin, internal thermal irregularities and the sensation of sweat pooling in your rubber-lined g’rilla gloves.

In 2006, myself and a Red Gate colleague took part in the Great Gorilla Run. It’s a run that raises money for The Gorilla Organisation which grew out of the Dianne Fossey fund.

It’s a simple enough premise. You dress up in a gorilla suit and run, lope, jog and generally monkey around on a 7 kilometre course through the centre of London. But of course you’re not alone. There are over 700 other g’rillas doing the same, which makes for a particularly surreal experience. What makes it even more surreal is that the number of people dressed up in gorilla suits, actually outnumber the remaining gorillas left in the wild. A scary thought.

So last time around, we were a bit stupid. On a day where temperatures hit the heady UK heights of 25 degrees Celsius we were dressed head to foot in thick fur. But that wasn’t the stupid part. You see… to be a real g’rilla you can’t just wear the standard suit. That would be silly. Not only would nobody be able to know who is who, but you’d miss out on the true overheating experience that can only be achieved when you augment your suit with more insulating materials. We decided to additionally wear suits and ties, and importantly, nice thick wigs to stop heat escaping from our rubber encased heads.

I’m the one in the blonde wig replenishing fluids, clutching an industrial sized ‘nana.

So roll on September 2008 and it was time to don the suit again, only this time with a few more Red Gate people to take part:

Rachel Potts
Stuart Laurie
Marine Barbaroux
Hazel Reed
Myself

This time, we thought we’d train a bit so that we’d be at optimal g’rilla performance. Weeks were spent running to build up the stamina required for such an event. We spent nights just “ooking” at each other to get into character. We were on a strict diet of nanas, nana shakes and fleas that we managed to pick off each other.

We needed a theme of course, lest we be ridiculed. And with multiple g’rillas some kind of group costume was very much the requirement.

After several themes were discarded for being too indistinct or just plain too difficult, we settled on The Village People – that fantastic YMCA warbling ensemble from the 1970’s:

A shortage at the local fancy dress establishment ensured that we had to avoid the traffic cop guy - we just couldn’t find a suitable helmet in any size that would fit over the top of a gorilla head.

At the store, the cost of their only Indian headdress was prohibitive, and to be frank, was completely rubbish. But at Red Gate, we employ talented people, and Marine did construct an Indian Headdress of remarkable authenticity out of straws, disposable protective clothing, paint, cotton, pillow cases and feathers.

So whilst it took hours to construct, the end result was nothing short of brilliant and really made us recognisable as the iconic disco group.

Early on the misty Saturday morning of the race our taxi arrived to take us to the train station. I believe it was quite a shock for the driver to see us fully suited up and liberally depositing fur on the seats of his nice clean cab. But this reaction was to become normal as we took the train from Cambridge to London and then weaved our way across the London Underground.

Getting on public transport dressed as a g’rilla rocks.

It’s ace.

After the final preparations before the race, the horn was sounded and 730 g’rillas were let loose on the streets of London. We set off at the back of the pack, and decided to take it pretty leisurely. After all, we had dancing to do.

Stuart (in the construction worker suit) had an iPod and portable speakers stashed in his toolbelt constantly playing a selection of the Village People’s classics. But after listening to a few and assessing their quality, we quickly decided to just loop YMCA with the occasional “In the navy” if our arms were feeling a bit tired from performing the dance.

From left to right: Stuart, Hazel, Rachel, Marine, Dom.

Whilst the fastest g’rilla completed the “race” in an impressive 31 minutes and 40 seconds, our excuse was that we danced most of the way. Still, a time of 1 hour 19 minutes and 13 seconds is not to be “ooked” at, and places of 603 to 607 isn’t too shabby in a field of 730. We think. You can disagree obviously. But you’d be wrong.

As a group we managed to raise over £1000 with various fund raising activities. We baked cakes, made some Oooky oooky sauce (banana chutney), held a knockout conker contest, gambled and received countless donations to our team donation page. If you want to donate to a great cause too, our page is at: http://www.justgiving.com/grillageeks

Dom and Marine selling food (and Oooky oooky sauce) at Red Gate

You can find more g’rilla mugshots and coverage of the event at:

http://www.greatgorillas.org/news/unprecedented-press-at-gorilla-run

Post by Dom Reed.

All Your Kitchen Are Belong To Us

red@work — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 16:42:00 GMT

Apropos of nothing, we’ve just moved into a new office to house our ever-burgeoning workforce, and naturally there are a few important tweaks that need to be made to make the place fit for use. Like upgrading how much sweet, sweet caffeine the new coffee machine will dispense in one go, for a start. Until 2 weeks ago, it gave precisely half a cup of coffee every time you pressed the button. Ok, not a problem, just press the button twice, yes? Except that you now have a mug so full that surface tension is the only thing keeping the coffee inside it. And its temperature is best described as ‘volcanic’, so sipping it down to more practical levels is not really an option.

One of the more prosaic benefits of having seriously technical people in the building is that they are very good at tinkering with anything electrical. In this case, they managed to convince the coffee machine to give us a decent cup of coffee at a temperature more tolerable to human beings without fire-proof throats (and for that we are all eternally grateful). They’ve also had a go at reconfiguring one of our fridges, though I was too afraid to ask exactly what they hoped to achieve *. Email in the desserts, perhaps.

It amused me to walk through the kitchen and hear this hushed conversation:

“Ahhhh…”

“So this is…”

“Yup, and then you need to press …”

“Right… so how do you get the next…?”

“Just press it again”

“Oh, ok.”

… and then turn around and find Nigel and Rob peering into the innards of the refrigerator. When I finally got the courage to ask them about it later, their only comment was:

“We are 133t h4x0r5”

I'm too scared to ask what’s next on their hit-list. Has anyone else hacked / modded an appliance?

post by Chris Massey

* I subsequently discovered that they were trying to get the top shelf of the fridge to cool down, as it was, at the time, actually hotter than the ambient room temperature.

Power to the (Right) People

red@work — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 16:45:00 GMT

The best way of leaning to swim is to get thrown in the Deep(er) End of the pool. Preferably by someone with the inclination to come rescue you if you start to drown. You either learn to tread water remarkably fast, or you get fished out, calmed down, and promptly thrown in again. So that’s exactly what Red Gate does; it takes people, and sends them barreling, head-first, into the educational pool:

“I thought everyone was really enthusiastic about being here. Like there must be something in the air conditioning. People really loved being here. I’ve never worked anywhere where people have been so happy to work and so proud of their company.

I remember Andras, my manager, saying
“Do you know about SQL Server?”
“No”
“Well then you can read up about it and give us a presentation about it. And do you know about C#?”
“No, not really”
“Well you can give us a presentation on that, too. So is there anything else that you don’t know?”
“I know everything else. All other knowledge.”

That was quite frightening. It’s good way to learn, when you’ve got that sort of pressure on you.”
- Alice Easey

“Pretty much the first thing that happened after I got in was that Neil gave me a massive, thick book on SQL Server and said “Read that, and at the end of the week, I want you to do a presentation on how you’d create a set of command line tools for our SQL Comparison tools”. There was no sense of easing in; although I did get told I had to go home at 5.”
- Bart Read

I was just told, “Write a program, get yourself used to the language”, because I haven’t used C# a lot before.
But I wasn’t told “write this particular thing” which I knew was meaningless, I was told to make up a meaningless job for myself, just to get the training done. And that’s exactly what I want to do, because I’m perfectly capable of thinking up a meaningless job to get myself into the language.
-Alex Davies

Clearly this ‘Deep-End’ style of learning is effective; people keep wanting to buy our products, and we keep growing as a company. Yet just as clearly, venturing into unknown waters is not an induction process that will work for everyone. Many people prefer to be eased into a new role, and shown the proverbial ropes one at a time. And there’s nothing at all wrong with that, it’s just a different style of learning. But it’s a style of learning that makes the ‘Deep End’ system seem like a kind of nightmare.

One of my colleagues mentioned to me that “Deep End” implies ‘drowning’ and ‘overload’, and that’s very much NOT what I’m suggesting is the case here. I’m not saying that, as a new starter, you’re given a desk and PC, told “Go get ‘em, tiger!” and that’s the end of your human contact. Not by a long shot – The open atmosphere in the office means that I can ask anyone for help if I need it (I’ve even had one of the directors lend me a hand on occasion). It’s all about learning-by-doing and getting involved immediately; I have to be self-motivated and passionate if I want to keep up with the energy here. There’s no time for spoon-feeding or hand-holding, only for jumping in, both feet first, with enthusiasm and (we all like to think) creativity.

So should you come prepared with a life-jacket and inflatable dinghy? Absolutely not, but bring a snorkel. Or maybe scuba gear. To thrive in this kind of environment, you need to be someone who gets the best out of themselves when they get stuck in. And to keep the open culture alive, you also need people who are receptive to that kind of collaborative and generous atmosphere. When you find these people, they create a workplace which is both energizing and entertaining. As an added bonus, they also create a strong sense of a welcoming community; importantly, a sense which endures as that community swells and outgrows its original boundaries.

The timeline of Red Gate’s non-stop growth.

All Work and No Play?

If you’re going to have these semi-mythical, self-motivated and creative people as your employees, you have to give them space to play. You try and chain someone like that to a desk and just see how far you get. Recruit the right people (and think carefully about who they are, first). Nudge them into the thick of activity and let them get on with it. Give them NERF guns.

Yes, I’m being silly; but my point is no less meaningful for it. If people are going to thrive in the Deep End, they’re also going to need to act like big kids occasionally.

So, take one portion of motivated and intelligent people, drop into the deep-end with a generous helping of fun, and mix well. The result? A crucible of creative ideas, fuelled by people who are (or are rapidly becoming) incredibly skilled in their chosen fields, and which encourages individuality. Sounds like a recipe for success...

The right people. Empowered.

Post by Chris Massey

Simply different: ingenious!

red@work — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Having seen Chris’ post yesterday, I thought I’d bring another perspective to the table. I joined Red Gate a few weeks ago, and from all I’d learned before joining I thought it was a cracking company, doing things in a different way. In particular I think it’s taking the consumer-led approach to products and business and applying it in a space which has traditionally been addressed in a very different manner.

So, people in organisations are being sold to as if they were consumers, with products which have a quality, an intent, and hopefully a pervasiveness which mirrors them as consumers in the working place. That interests me an awful lot.

I’ve spent a lot of time with more ‘enterprise-y’, more classical ways of offering, making and developing products (both hardware and software), almost always in leading high-tech early markets. But this is the first organisation which I’ve been exposed to which is approaching those problems in a very different way, and that interests me and attracted me - and the more I’ve learned, the more that instinct has become validated.

So I’m intrigued by that approach, I’m intrigued by the fact that it’s different, I’m intrigued by the fact that the image and execution of the company is distinct, and I’m intrigued by the mantra of ‘simplicity’.

If I were to describe the culture of Red Gate, I think two words would spring to mind. One of them is ‘Different’, and the other is ‘Friendly’, or ‘People-Oriented’. I’ve never before worked for a company where, after accepting the job offer, I was sent a helium balloon as part of a package of goodies as a way to say ‘Hi’. I think that’s very interesting, because I think at one level it says “people are people”, and the organisation promotes its ‘people-ness’, as much as anything else.

And that principle I’ve seen in the last few weeks in spades; People have approached me, they’ve looked after me, they’ve said ‘hi’… all that stuff. It’s a very different experience from many (particularly larger) organisations, where you’re dumped at a desk, told “here’s your email, here’s your phone, and off you go”. It’s very different from that, very welcoming; but I think it’s indicative of a principle, a theme, a trend in the company which is very strong.

When I say ‘different’, I mean it in a good way. Little things are done differently and, most importantly, cleverly differently. Just to give you an example, on the website, there is a list of references. Many companies have references. Often times those references are highly contrived, very strongly marketed and they say “the product’s good, it works, it does what it says on the tin”. What I noticed of Red Gate was that the recommendations still say the products are good; but they - or rather we - say it by having lots of verbatim comments from many, many people. And my initial reaction was,

“That’s odd”

My next reaction was,

“You know what, there’s a lot of content there”

And my third reaction was,

“It’s different, and it’s different in a positive and clever way”

And now I’m inside the building I’m beginning to see what I think is an underlying theme; that:

A) It’s ok to be different and -

B) Difference could be a strength, a discriminator, an opportunity.

I’ve seen differences accepted. I’ve seen real consensus-led meetings, and that, in a sense, shows a culture which is valuing difference when applied objectively. And I suspect I will see other instances where being different has been taken to become a virtue, for very good and thinking reasons.

Another difference, and I’ve never had this before: on my first day there was an envelope on my desk with a card, signed by a bunch of members of the team, and with a picture on the card as I recognised (on about day 1-&-a-half) as caricatures of people in the company. I thought that was an extraordinarily nice thing to do, which was also very, very welcoming.

I think the thing I remember the most about my first day here was the efficiency. I could see my arrival had been planned to more than just having a desk and a chair. I was taken by the HR department into a meeting, and run through all the practical stuff, which was good because it’s a good chance to ask all those very boring questions about where everything is. But that was done very quickly.

One of the other things that impressed me was the briefing paper I was given, which was almost a mini project-planner with the sorts of things I should be doing on day1, day2, week2, week3 etc. There had been significant thought given to that plan, and work doing it, because it was for ME, not just a new person. It was personalised, it was directed, and I’ve found that very useful, because it’s given me something to hang on to and do. And I’ve never had that anywhere else. I’ve been in meetings where people have verbally said, “Here’s a bunch of things”, and I’ve been in situations where someone has said “well, the ‘project manager’ (or whoever) left, here’s his departure notes”…not the same thing at all.

Paul Galwas

New Kid on the Block

red@work — Mon, 29 Sep 2008 19:50:00 GMT

I only recently joined Red Gate, and when I found out I was being offered the job I was already pretty excited. After all, they’ve actually got awards for being a great place to work. But then, something happened which completely changed how I thought about the company. Specifically, I stopped thinking about it as a company, and started thinking about it as a collection of people. That might sound small, but to an individual it makes a world of difference to be joining a group of human beings, rather than a faceless corporation. Two weeks before I actually joined the company, I got a call from a courier service asking me when it would be convenient for them to drop off my parcel.

“Huh? What parcel?”

“It’s from ‘Red Gate Software’… I think it’s a uniform or something.”

Now, having been to the company offices for my interviews, I already knew that Red Gate was not a “matching jumpsuits” kind of place, but I HAD seen a few people walking around with branded T-shirts. Ah, a little welcoming gift – that’s nice of them.

What actually arrived on my doorstep was a huge gift wrapped box containing, amongst other things, a helium balloon, a bottle of wine and a card with a hand-written message welcoming me to the company. And a T-shirt.

Now, I realise this makes it look I’m easily bought by anyone with a helium balloon and a bottle of wine, but that’s not the point. The point is that before I’d got anywhere near my desk, my team or my work, they were already taking steps to make sure I felt welcomed, appreciated and anticipated. And it worked; when I finally came into the office, spoke to people here and saw the (second) card on my desk, I realised that they were all genuinely glad to meet me. This is a place where people are not just employed, they’re celebrated. What is interesting is that I’ve discovered that there are shelves rammed full of the stuff used to fill the goodie boxes, so they clearly aren’t that expensive or difficult to organise. Yet nobody I’ve spoken to in other companies can share a similar experience with me. If this stuff is so easy and cheap to do, why aren’t more companies taking this small step to make their new employees feel that little bit more welcomed?

I think it fundamentally boils down to the company culture as a whole. Red Gate seems to value its people as people, not just money-making cube-monkeys, and by doing so it gets the best performance it can from them. And as a culture, it’s shared by each individual, as well as the whole. I’ve had people I’ve never met stop and ask me how I’m getting on, and inviting me to go and chat to them whenever I have a question they can help with. Sure, I could probably go and do that anyway, but I’m constantly being invited to do so, and that just makes it easy for ideas to move around.

However, it’s not JUST all friendly and fluffy here - Red Gate subscribes to the ‘Deep-End’ style of learning, which is exactly as challenging as it sounds. That doesn’t mean it’s not rewarding, though – far from it. I’ve learned a huge amount about developing code, marketing and publishing, often from the same people, and I know I’ve got a huge amount more to take in. But because I’ve had to find that information out for myself, it’s infinitely more satisfying to me. Let’s just say that being thrown in at the deep end isn’t the only way to learn, but it’s a very effective way to learn.

If I’m going to sum up what it’s like to be the new recruit at Red Gate in a few words, I’d say these are the words with the most mileage:

Exciting, rewarding, challenging, relaxed, fun.

Even now, months after I got my box of freebies, whenever I speak to anyone about this place the first thing I say is

“The people are awesome!”

I know that I sound like a walking endorsement, but let’s check the facts:

A company culture completely orientated towards valuing people as people.
- Check

Working with people who are friendly and collectively motivated to achieving the best they can.
- Check

Work which challenges me, and allows me to develop.
- Check

Seriously, what’s not to like?

- Posted by Chris Massey

Marketing from the ground up

red@work — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 19:17:00 GMT

How do you market a product that doesn’t exist to people that you don’t know, in places you can’t find?

This has been our basic problem in marketing Exchange Server Archiver. As a newly-arrived summer intern, I was pretty confused. I had a list of instructions, saying things like ‘research Exchange user groups and bloggers’. This I dutifully tried, though it isn’t easy to establish where all the Exchange people hang out. I made lists with emails, URLs, and half-coherent notes.

Then I was shown the info the rest of the ESA team had compiled months earlier, from talking to people at Tech Ed. Turns out there were quite a few Exchange users there, and these people had said a whole lot of things about what they wanted from an Exchange Archiver. As they did this, members of the marketing and product management teams had cunningly probed their psychological makeup, looking for the triggers and turn-ons that would provide a way into their hearts.

I now realise that I was supposed to be confused from the start- everyone is. Exchange Server Archiver will be a completely new area for Red Gate. The plan was, and remains, to figure out how we are going to market it. Whatever we do, it won’t be the same as the strategy for SQL and .NET tools. Sure, we are using User Groups and bloggers. We are giving away an eBook. We are compiling lists of emails and building Simple Talk Exchange as a community. But the Exchange admin is a more elusive beast. Rather than spreading himself across the rich grazing pastures of the SQL communities sites, he forms a giant herd at MSExchange.org, eschewing the varieties of grass on offer elsewhere. Moreover, he is prone to shape-shift. Pre-greenlight research found that admins typically spend less than 5 hours a week on Exchange tasks.

In a state of ignorance, how best to acquire knowledge? Plagarism, naturally. The email archiving market is densely populated, and surely some of the competition must have an inside line on innovative and successful marketing strategies. Yeah, you’d think that, wouldn’t you? Sadly, this doesn’t seem to be the case. A certain unnamed competitor has gone for that old chestnut, an angry IT man, in their flash ads.

As in…. “Is problem X making you angry? Try solution X”, a formula that fits more or less any product.

Try it yourself. This is mine.

“My ears won’t stop growing doctor”
*angry picture with big ears*
“Try Uncle Albert’s ear restraint formula”

Anyway, my point is, the competition doesn’t seem to be on top of its game either. The company above has one of the better web presences of competitors in this market. Red Gate are going to have to come up with creative and interesting ways to reach Exchange admins, and that means being bold with new ideas. That doesn’t mean we can’t use skills we’ve learnt in community and influencer marketing for SQL and .NET to build up Simple Talk Exchange. We just need to remember that we’re chasing a different kind of customer and entering a totally new marketplace.

If anyone knows how to find Exchange admins, how they think, and how to reach them, any thoughts are welcome…drop them in the comments.

Cheers,

Owen Sanderson

From Waterfall to Scrum

red@work — Tue, 01 Jul 2008 17:15:00 GMT

From Waterfall to Scrum

How do you scale your development processes?

Once upon a time Red Gate had a single development team. It was small enough to write software for a new product by doing a few iterations of the more traditional waterfall method.

We now have something like eight development projects, 13 products for continued development and new ones on the way, and nearly 40 developers and testers to keep interested. We need development processes that scale. So, we turned to Scrum, an agile process for complex software development.

Along with four colleagues, I recently attended the certified ScrumMaster Training course. We already have one Scrum team up and running and other teams using some of the principles. Now that that I’ve considered it further, I really believe that Scrum is a framework we can take advantage of. But, it’s not going to be easy to fit our current processes around Scrum.

Beyond “single wringable neck”

Red Gate project managers in the past have been the individuals responsible for building the right product in the right way. It’s a tough call delegating tasks, making project estimates, managing risk, helping to support the current product, researching for future releases, and above all, keeping spirits up.

Having been a project manager on both large and small projects and bearing the weight of being the “single wringable neck,” I am lapping up the Scrum approach. The roles are different; it’s the product owner who takes care of whether the team is building the right product. The team takes responsibility collectively for building it right. The ScrumMaster facilitates the team, but doesn’t manage the individuals; instead the team is self managing! This sounds amazing. Can it work here?

In the past year we have ramped up product management activities hugely, and it shows. Currently, project managers work together with product managers to get a project to the “greenlight” stage. With the work research product managers have done, we know a lot about the ROI, future plans beyond this release, and who we are building the product for.

At the greenlight presentation a panel (none of whom are on the development team) decides whether to take the product as planned into full development and agrees on deadlines for when it will make it to market. Product managers are still involved during development and help guide the team to making sure we are building the right software. They also make decisions about how features are implemented and the priority of work.

Focus and visibility

Using Scrum, a team should be able to demonstrate what tasks are done at the end of a Scrum sprint (typically three weeks). Following the planning stage at the start of the sprint, it’s inevitable that new tasks come to light, such as bugs or GUI tweaks. These are either handled in the same sprint or moved onto the backlog for the subsequent sprints.

There’s a lot more focus and visibility. It is easier to accurately predict how long the remaining work will take because the team is learning how much work it can handle during each sprint and how much extra work each task typically creates.

There is less frustration if the goal posts need to be moved during a project, and shifting of priorities for new designs or features is handled more efficiently. Since the completed sprints, the tasks in progress, and the backlog for the next sprint are visible to the product owner, swapping a feature priority on the backlog is perfectly fine. That’s not usually the reaction when projects are forced to deviate from the original plan!

I remember a situation on a major release where we planned several eagerly awaited features at the start and used a finger in the air to estimate when we’d be done. Developers started coding the complex problems but moved onto the next one at the point they had solved the difficult, most risky element of the solution. Getting them to finish any feature off so that we could test, run usability tests, and write documentation was nearly impossible.

The developers argued that by taking the complexity out of each of the features we were planning to implement, they were removing risk from the project deadline. But inevitably the software was shipped later than planned. Usability engineers weren’t able to put a working product in front of an end user until we were way into our development journey. As a result, the changes we made based on user feedback put us behind schedule. No one on the team, let alone the greenlight panel, was able to see any finished part of the product working.

Writing software in sprints, where you demonstrate finished tasks, however small, provides visibility that benefits everyone.

Who’s the owner?

At Red Gate, we want to provide an environment where people good at writing code, testing software, designing interfaces, and writing technical documentation can flourish and get on with what they are good at. The self-organizing Scrum team encourages this.

We already have individuals who would be able to facilitate teams in this way and make sure there is respect and openness. In my opinion, the biggest obstacle we face is how to make the product owner role work. It might be a case that the product owner is a combination of individuals, including a product manager and a usability engineer. They collectively are responsible for building the right product since they are the ones talking to end users, who ultimately determine the success of our products.

How are you doing it?

Are you dealing with development scaling issues? If so, how are you handling it? Would Scrum work for your organization?

Have you tried Scrum? If so, what has been your experience? What are the best and worst things about Scrum?

Post by Helen Joyce

Thank you to the .NET Developer Group in Braunschweig

red@work — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 19:03:00 GMT

At Red Gate we have a ‘Memory Wall’ that proudly displays a number of Red Gate’s finest (and not so finest!) moments over the past eight years. We have some super photos of our joint CEO, Neil Davidson, looking like a fresh-faced university graduate, and some even better ones of my favourite Project Manager, Bart Read, sporting a rather fetching ladies handbag.

What we don’t have in the office is a photo wall for the pictures that we receive from our Red Gate friends. So, I have decided to start posting them here so that everyone can share them.

Thanks very much to Lars Keller at the .NET Developer Group in Braunschweig for this picture of their recent user group meeting. As you can see, they are a very fashionable bunch!

Post by Rachel.

How to make friends – by Red Gate

red@work — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 17:54:00 GMT

Red Gate, to the untrained eye, looks a lot like other companies. We are departmentalised, we are spread over multiple offices, and we sometimes don’t know what other areas of the company are up to (note to Sara – when do we find out what “activities” we will be taking part in at the Red Gate Summer Day Out this year!?). However, one thing you could never accuse us of is failing to work as a team.

Teamwork can never really be an element of a project that you plan, but I can assure you that Red Gate always manages to successfully pull it off. I think the reason is because we try so hard not to be departmentalised. Making friends at work often sounds like ‘pie-in-the-sky’ ideology, but when you are thrown into a foreign country with nine people you don’t really know, you’d be surprised at how many you are still talking to when you get back again! And I don’t mean that in a negative way either.

I’ve been lucky enough to travel with colleagues to two tradeshows, and both have been great fun. I will never forget my first year at Microsoft TechEd. I was terrified before we left, not to mention slightly concerned about travelling with a group of work colleagues for a week. I could have saved myself a lot of unnecessary stress because Team Red Gate was AWESOME!

If you walk around your office and look at the different groups of people I bet you find yourself thinking ‘Why does every member of that department [insert stereotypical comment here]?’ I do it in our offices all the time: why does our HR and Administration department look like they have just stepped out of a women’s fashion magazine? Why do all our developers wear really huge headphones? I guess some things are just meant to remain a mystery.

But, despite our differences, there is nothing more fun than making new friends. I wouldn’t have found my new Puma handbag if it weren’t for a shopping expedition in Orlando with Cara our Office Administrator. You overlook your own comparatively awful fashion sense and her lack of giant headphones when you find that your new friend from HR turns out to share your love of mojitos and retro handbags! And let’s face it, who knew that our Head of Development, Tom, could trot out so many of Chopin’s piano Nocturnes at the drop of a hat.

But it’s not just our immediate team that we enjoy spending time with. All of the Red Gate employees cite meeting real customers at trade events as a big deal. Over the past twelve months I have met some great people. Those I have kept in touch with most regularly are Jason Follas (SQL Server MVP) and Jeff McWherter of the Greater Lansing .NET User Group. This year I was introduced to Joe Kunk who is the President of Jeff’s user group, and he very kindly sent me this super picture of Red Gate friendship being shared at TechEd Developers in Orlando this year.

The moral of this story is that Red Gate really isn’t like other companies. We honestly do like spending time with each other. Underneath the layers of fashionable attire, our HR and Administration team are great to work with and even better to hang out with after office hours. Most importantly though, when we meet or hear from our customers, we really take notice of what you are saying and what you are getting up to just as much as we do with our fellow Red Gaters. So Joe, I hope that you are still enjoying working with Jeff at A. J. Boggs despite him being your manager during work hours! And Mike (Michael Fors of the Hawaii .NET User Group) I will be in touch to take you up on your offer of a holiday in Hawaii just as soon as I have a week to spare!

Post by Rachel.