Life At Anansi: Meet Vasco Correia, Senior Software Engineer

In the first of a brand new series, #lifeatanansi, we caught up with our Senior Software Engineer, bug fixing legend and all round great guy Vasco.

#lifeatanansi is all about getting under the Anansi bonnet; getting to know the people that work here and finding out exactly what life at Anansi is like. 

Read on to find out about Vasco’s desert island must haves, the future of Anansi, and what it’s like working day to day in a remote, global team.

Please introduce yourself, tell us where you are based and what you do here?

Hello I’m Vasco! I’m a Portuguese software engineer, currently living in Lisbon.  I’ve mostly worked on backend development throughout my career.

Which team do you work in and what’s the team’s overall goal?

I work in the engineering team. We design, build and maintain the Anansi platform. We also support the rest of the Anansi team – Insurance, Marketing, Partnerships –  with anything requiring a technical approach or expertise.

What are the top 3 things you enjoy about working at Anansi?

1. I really enjoy having the opportunity to work at an early stage startup and experience all of its ups and downs.
2. I also like that my decisions will have a big impact. Anansi has goals, but the ways to get there are not totally set in stone. I feel like I have the opportunity to help steer it into its goals, as best as I can.
3. And finally, the fact that it’s a fully remote company. I started working remotely during the height of the pandemic… and I love it, it’s the way I feel the most productive.

What’s been the biggest challenge you’ve faced while working here and how did you overcome it?

Being a startup at such an early stage, there is sometimes chaos and uncertainty, mostly related to things outside of our control. Sometimes we need to move really fast and messily, advancing at pace without fully knowing certain details. Other times things need to  be carefully planned, assessed and executed so it’s a constant balancing act that is not always completely obvious.

What attracted you to working at Anansi?

The fact that Anansi is an early stage startup and the role was fully remote which really works for me and brings out the best in me!.

How would you describe the company culture?

Dedicated and effective.

I feel like everybody really cares for what they’re doing and does the best they can. And everybody is extremely competent which means we are actually accomplishing really big things on at least a weekly basis.

Tell us what your day to day looks like working in a remote team?

I’m not really able to answer that and that’s the beauty of working in a remote team – it changes a lot and fast!  But everyday we have a couple of really quick meetings just as a “status update” from everybody – it’s great to see everyone and stay in touch irrespective of where we are based.

After that, it depends. Maybe there’s an important issue to discuss and we have a more in depth meeting between the engineering and another team or maybe we found a tricky bug, and a couple of people spend the whole afternoon on a zoom call trying to fix it!  Or it can be a calm day, where everybody is just focused on building a new feature or writing documentation.

What are you most excited about for the future of Anansi?

I’m really excited about the partnership opportunities that we’re working on, it will increase the volume of parcels we’ll track and insure and will also increase awareness of Anansi.  Plus, it’s a great challenge from a technical perspective which I love.

If you were to give yourself an alternative job title, what would it be?

I wouldn’t. I’m a software engineer and, while working on a software product from a technical perspective, I’ll always be a software engineer. There could be some adjective before or after, but those two words should be there because they’re what exactly matches what I do.

What three things would you take to a deserted island?

• A large knife
• A handful of dice
• Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations
   

If you’d like to learn more about #lifeatanansi drop us a line or head over to our careers page to view our open roles.