“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”
– Dr Seuss

I care a great deal about anything I work on, as I mentioned in my previous post here (ironically about not working for once), so it goes without saying that I am super invested in any customer I help to get up and running with any of the Redgate solutions, and none more so than Data Masker.

Ever since it became part of the Redgate family Data Masker has been an integral part of my workday – there aren’t many days where I don’t interact with the tool or it’s concepts in some way and when things go wrong, the tool breaks, something doesn’t work like it should, well not only is it less than ideal for me (showing me up) but it’s not delivering value to the customer.

Now that. I hate with a passion.

However, I’m lucky enough that once that happens, that is not the end of it – we don’t pack everything up and say “well… sorry all, that’s your lot.” No – I get to speak directly to our fantastic support team and the equally as fabulous and helpful development team directly behind the tool, and guess what? They care too. Immensely.

I can think of 2 key examples of this team working in the most incredible way, you wouldn’t even believe (well maybe you would), but it goes to show you what is possible, especially when you break down the silos in your organisation. I never became just “a ticket from a sales engineer”, and this is how they helped me fix 2 problems:

1 – UTF-8 encoding of strings for substitution rules

I was working closely with one of the Business Development folk (little side nod there to Kendra for saying folk so often I’ve started saying it) in Redgate’s sales team who were working with a potential customer in a country where Arabic is the primary language. As such, you would expect them to want to use Data Masker to mask Arabic names like اَمير‎ (“Amir” in English) into data sets, instead of something like “Frank”, which just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

It turns out that in the port across of Data Masker from it’s older v5.5 to the swanky new v6.0 (yes this was a little while back) the ability to change the encoding of strings from user defined data sets had been broken, which meant that the values from Data Masker weren’t being inserted correctly in the table, rendering all of their Arabic sets useless. This was a huge blocker to their trial, which was under time constraints anyway.

I reported this to the Data Masker team on the 7th February 2019 at 12:53pm, created a support ticket for reference at 2.03pm and had personally spoken to them by 3.00pm. The lead developer, support rep, product designer and myself quickly met up to discuss it and agreed that as this was a bug, broken functionality that should exist (and which could block not just this customer but any customer requiring it for other language sets) that they would down tools and work on a fix immediately.

By 9.00am the following day a fix went out the door. Built, tested, deployed. Who did they involve in the testing? Me, initially. Then they waited on feedback from the potential customer, who also confirmed it worked after upgrading.

Wow. That’s what I call fast!

2 – Time-out tennis

More recently (think November 2019) I was working with a customer of ours who I had built up a great relationship with – they were super friendly, super responsive and all round great to work with. Unfortunately as we were getting their masking sets set-up (pun definitely intended) we started encountering time out issues when waiting for masking stats to return.

This was a little irksome, as it was a slight dent in my relationship and credibility and was slowing them down, as it was causing sets to not complete at all.

The problem was though, it wasn’t such an easy fix as with Number 1 above, as it wasn’t exactly clear what was causing the timeouts and I wasn’t really sure what were the best places to check! Fortunately the “Masketeers” as they are more commonly known around Redgate towers, did have an idea of where to look. A nominated member of the development team (and to him I will be forever grateful) almost became a little subdivision of the team – it didn’t require their full might, just someone who knew even more intimately what was happening than me!

Through a few ‘back and forth’s with the customer, experimenting with timeouts and making some tweaks we were able to establish what was going wrong, and ultimately provide a fix. This work became a new branch which was merged into the main base after testing once again and was released the very next day. Finally, the customer let us know it was all working again and sets were completing as they should.

Conclusion?

Sometimes you have the pleasure of working with some unsung heroes where you work, I do it on a regular basis – from the facilities and cleaning team here in the building who do the most incredible work to look after us, to the Sales management team who are constantly looking at ways to make us the best possible company to deal with – Redgate is definitely a place where people can do the best work of their lives.

But on these occasions, I got to witness something special. Cross-functional collaboration. Communication. Empathy. Passion.

And just getting the work done. When it’s about delivering value to customers, feedback, development and testing are everybody’s job, and I’m lucky enough to work with people who put that theory into practice.