Meet the team: Ivan Willig, Software Engineer

What Do You Do?

I work on the API server which is basically the backend that takes requests from the front-end and saves them to the database. It’s pretty exciting.

Why Shortcut?

I enjoy working with people who like to solve problems. I like smaller teams that are really focused on doing something that they have control over and actually are able to effect change in whatever we’re doing.

The other thing is that as I’ve wandered around the tech industry, I’ve realized that something that I feel like we haven’t figured out how to do very well as an industry is manage people. We have all these different tools and all these different processes — it’s not like we don’t have the right language or the right compiler, you know –but it does seem like that there are still gaps and the problems that we face as an industry often boil down to people or organizational or planning problems. So I was drawn to building a tool that could help organize how people do software development.

If you could invite anyone living or dead, real or imaginary to your Shortcut, who would you invite and why?

Probably Genghis Khan. I read a book about him recently and he seems like a fascinating person in history. He was really good at managing people; that was the key to his army. There’s few people that have changed the world as much as he had. I would wanna have lunch with them. I guess he’d be invited to my Shortcut. I don’t know what that means.

BTW, Shortcut is hiring! If what we’re doing sounds like what you’d like to do, check us out.

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