Nicholas Platt
Current Employer/Organisation Name
TransferWise
What have you been doing since leaving Exeter, and what are you doing now?
I started working at TransferWise immediately after graduation joining as a Junior SRE. My role largely focuses on aspects of automation, keeping production up and running in addition to providing ways for product developers to ship their features faster and foster a culture of ownership and reliability.
Why did you choose this career? And what do you enjoy most about your work?
I’m very much interested in both software development, traditional system administration and hardware. I felt this role gave me the best blend of everything whereby I can deal with the complexities of networking and running large clusters of cloud computing whilst also being able to write code and scripts everyday.
Were you part of the Exeter Student Ambassador Scheme at any point during your studies?
Yes.
What did you enjoy most about your programme and what was the biggest highlight?
David Wakeling is a massive help and assert into getting into industry and understanding the differences between the work you do at university and in the workplace. Seek him out and ask for his guidance, he’s always been more than happy to help.
Why did you choose to study at Exeter?
Had a good reputation at the time for Computer Science and an excellent student entrepreneurship scheme that I heavily involved myself with and largely credit for my current successes.
What skills and experiences have been most useful for your career?
My placement year was massively helpful, it was the first real opportunity of working full time in industry alongside other developers and required me to expand my skillset far beyond that of what I was learning at university. Despite Uni preparing you for fundamentals that actual skillset required in the workplace differ a fair bit.
What advice would you give to a current student who wishes to pursue your career?
Find our about and play around with typical tools at home, see if you can setup your own AWS account and spin up a virtual machine, or write some scripts that automate repetitive tasks you carry out often. Also install linux, get familiar with the command line interface and try running a few docker containers in a virtual network. Being able to talk about these types of skills even if you’ve only lightly touched the surface will go a great way to demonstrating to interviewers that you have a genuine interest and basic understanding that can be built on top of.
What are your plans for the future?
Eventually to either join an early stage start up or begin my own. This will be some time after gaining a little more experience in the sector and industry, as well as building my network.
