WeAreDelphix: Meet Ben Page

In this edition of WeAreDelphix, we're thrilled to feature Ben Page, an engineer on the cloud team at Delphix. Based in Boston, Ben talks about his most memorable project with the company and he showcases his mad rhyming skills.

What do you do at Delphix and what inspired you to join the company?

I’m a software engineer on the cloud team at Delphix. For the past two and a half years, I worked on numerous bugs, escalations, and projects as part of the data masking team. Now, I work on our centralized management platform, building a display that lists all of the jobs across all engines connected to our cloud offering.

Prior to Delphix, I was an undergraduate student at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. I was looking to join a company with exciting technology, growth potential, and a strong culture around mentorship that would allow me to grow. Of course, these are all attributes of Delphix, but I was mainly inspired to join the company because of the people. During the interviewing process, I met a group of intelligent, passionate, and friendly people, who continue to play a very large role in making the work I do very enjoyable and rewarding.

You can ask me anything about…?

Interacting with the Delphix Masking application through the GUI and APIs.

Whether you’re trying to script against the APIs or understand the object model, I can help! I’ve spent a lot of time working on the APIs and the framework we use to implement the APIs, Swagger.

I’ve also spent a lot of time working on projects and building tools that are meant to make transferring state between masking applications a lot simpler, which is a procedure our customers regularly need to do. Before the masking job sync project, I built a tool that interacts with the masking APIs to do something very similar. Given the high demand from customers, Delphix decided to open source it, so that customers can use and contribute to it as well!

What’s the coolest project you’ve worked on at Delphix?

The Masking job sync project was one of the coolest projects I’ve worked on at Delphix for a handful of reasons. It has very high customer impact and an extremely technical design.

This project was a great example of how Delphix listens to customers. We received feedback that the masking set-up was time-consuming and often required the same manual process across multiple instances of the application, making it harder for our customers to scale out horizontally to mask all their data in an efficient, timely manner.

To solve this challenge, we worked with our product management team to come up with a fantastic design that allowed for maximum flexibility and simplicity in use. The bulk of the technical design was focused around managing all of the intricate object dependencies and creating the best transfer mechanism to allow for efficient, tamper-proof object transfer from one instance of the application to another.

We also provided a way for our customers to look at objects on two separate applications and easily determine if they would behave the same or if one had changed since being synced.

What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received?

Take risks when life lets you because life is always changing.

What’s your secret talent?

My ability to write rhyming couplet poems.

They say that to succeed you need data to flow
Throughout an organization, all places high and low
But what they don’t say is how tricky this can be
As data is normally kept under lock and key
Or open to all in unmanaged ways
Keeping track of it can be like trying to solve a never-ending maze
Hindering productivity from engineering to sales
Leading to some of the internet’s most epic fails
So what is the trick to getting data management right?
Well, I am glad you asked because here comes your brave data knight!
Here to protect the most sensitive of all
Those pesky data robbers will certainly squall
For no customer data will be stolen by the result of their hacking
Because your org was smart and implemented Delphix data masking!

Describe yourself in 3 emojis.

⛷🐕🌄

What drives you every day?

My desire to build innovative tools that are superior to what exists today. This can be something as small as making a personal script do something it wasn’t doing before or as big as reducing the runtime of a key operation by 50 percent.

When I’m working on a project that I find interesting, my brain is always trying to figure out how I can make it more efficient, resilient, and effective. And when I have that mental breakthrough, all I want to do is get to my computer to start coding and testing my new idea right away!

Interested in working at Delphix? Apply today. Visit our blog to hear more from staff across our offices in Redwood City, San Francisco, Atlanta, Boston, Colorado, UK, Germany, Tokyo, Singapore and São Paulo.