David Perry: Developer
Quickfire Questions
Q: If you could have dinner with any historical figure, who would it be and why?
Galileo maybe, imagine being able to tell him we went to space and landed on the moon. I may need to learn Italian though.
Q: What's your go-to karaoke song (if you had to choose one)?
Enjoy the Silence by Depeche Mode, because it’s an absolute tune. Also, nobody wants to hear me sing and there isn’t much singing involved, so win-win for everyone.
Q: Do you have a favorite book, movie, or TV show that you recommend to everyone?
I love movies, TV and books so to recommend only one is really tough. I re-watched Whiplash (2014 movie) recently, it’s such a powerful and intense movie. It’s a real modern day masterpiece and perhaps a movie that isn’t on everyone’s radar so I will recommend that.
Q: Can you describe your role at Clenergy in one line?
Creating and maintaining UI features for our web and mobile applications, ensuring we provide the best possible user experience and allow users to effectively manage their EV chargers.
Q: What’s your favorite part of your job or the work you do?
I enjoy the creative outlet it provides, it’s always challenging and rarely boring.
Longer read
Q: How do you relax after a busy working week?
I’m really interested in craft beer and brewing (it's about ticking beers off rather than getting drunk) so I spend a lot of weekends either attending beer festivals or getting lost in dodgy industrial estates around the country searching for the latest taproom or brewery opening and blogging about it on social media (@pezthebeergeek on IG if anyone is interested).
Travelling is also a big passion of mine, we have recently visited NYC, Barcelona, Rome and Copenhagen. We would love to visit East and Southeast Asia next.
Gaming, reading, seeing family and friends and attending comedy and music gigs take up the rest of my time. However, I am in the market for a new hobby right now so if anyone has any suggestions, please let me know.
Q: If you could job-share with anyone in the company for a day, who would it be and what would you want to learn from them or contribute?
It would have to be someone customer facing, like Scott in Sales or Sam in Product, mainly because it’s a completely different world to the one I currently work in. It would be interesting to learn how we go about defining the product features we want to build based on customer requirements, how we sell our product to potential clients and what do they like and dislike about it.
If I were able to experience how users in the real world use the applications we work on every day, I think that could be useful to me in my Developer role. Within the development team, we are only really privy to how we as developers use the product but we are neither real world CPO/EMSP users or typical EV charge point users. If there are potential blind spots here, we could help to identify and improve upon these.
Q: What’s the best piece of advice you’ve ever received, professionally or personally?
“It is impossible to know everything”.
In programming and web development (as is true in many other professions I imagine) there is an almost infinite amount of information to learn. Earlier in my career, I always felt a certain amount of pressure to provide answers to questions I didn’t know the answer to; to understand complex logic straight away and this often resulted in me spending an unreasonable amount of time and effort outside of my role in the pursuit of knowledge. It was exhausting and not sustainable.
It has taken me years to accept and become comfortable with this “mantra” but I feel it has allowed me to relax in my role and become a better developer. Sometimes I do not know the answer to a question, or I make a mistake, and I tell myself that this is OK - I can learn from this. I think it’s important to be humble, to be able to accept when you are wrong or make a mistake and own it.
Q: What’s the most memorable project you’ve worked on, either here or in a previous job?
This might be a slightly cliche answer but I feel that nothing I've worked on previously has been as important as the work I do for Clenergy right now. My Wife works with vulnerable people in the community and I could see how rewarding that was for her, I felt like I was missing out. I became eager to turn my skills to something that would benefit others/ everyone and Clenergy allows me to do just that.
Protecting the environment for future generations has always been very important to me, it is a responsibility we all bear. If I can implement a new feature or even fix a bug that improves our product offering and that then has the potential to improve recognition, increase EV charger installations and boost EV usage, then there is a huge amount of reward in that for me.