Inside Red Gate - Introduction
- by Simon Cooper
I work for Red Gate Software, a software company based in Cambridge, UK. In this series of posts, I'll be discussing how we develop software at Red Gate, and what we get up to, all from a dev's perspective.
Before I start the series proper, in this post I'll give you a brief background to what I have done and continue to do as part of my job. The initial few posts will be giving an overview of how the development sections of the company work. There is much more to a software company than writing the products, but as I'm a developer my experience is biased towards that, and so that is what this series will concentrate on.
My background
Red Gate was founded in 1999 by Neil Davidson & Simon Galbraith, who continue to be joint CEOs. I joined in September 2007, and immediately set to work writing a new Check for Updates client and server (CfU), as part of a team of 2. That was finished at the end of 2007.
I then joined the SQL Compare team. The first large project I worked on was updating SQL Compare for SQL Server 2008, resulting in SQL Compare 7, followed by a UI redesign in SQL Compare 8. By the end of this project in early 2009 I had become the 'go-to' guy for the SQL Compare Engine (I'll explain what that means in a later post), which is used by most of the other tools in the SQL Tools division in one way or another.
After that, we decided to expand into Oracle, and I wrote the prototype for what became the engine of Schema Compare for Oracle (SCO). In the latter half of 2009 a full project was started, resulting in the release of SCO v1 in early 2010. Near the end of 2010 I moved to the .NET division, where I joined the team working on SmartAssembly. That's what I continue to work on today.
The posts in this series will cover my experience in software development at Red Gate, within the SQL Tools and .NET divisions. Hopefully, you'll find this series an interesting look at what exactly goes into producing the software at Red Gate.
