I came across Canny’s product at Kooltra, and was immediately impressed by its simplicity and thoughtfulness. Canny was an entirely bootstrapped company, with the founders being fellow Waterloo alumni living a digital nomad life.
Intrigued, I reached out about their Software Engineer posting and had great conversations with them. While the logistics didn’t work for me at the time, they had some projects I could help with, so I was happy to jump in.
The Work
Software Engineer, Part-time (Apr 2018 – Aug 2018)
It was a short stint, but we did some good work.
- I noticed that the generated
node_modulesfolder was committed to source control, so I worked to clean it up. - We discovered a wave of spam attacks with bots signing up for free trials then abusing Canny’s email notifications to do their free marketing, which Andrew and I mitigated.
- Canny was big on content marketing, and I drafted a blog post for them too, though I can’t recall if it was ever published.
Exit
Even though I was comfortable in my full-time job at Kooltra, adding another 10-15 hours of part-time work on top had started to take a toll on me.
After finding a full-time job and preparing to move to NYC, I wrapped up my projects with Canny around August 2018.
Takeaways
- This was my first experience with a fully remote team. I learned to over-communicate and be effective asynchronously.
- I was never a frontend person, but Andrew taught me the magic of flex boxes in CSS, which I’m happy to keep in my toolbox.
- I got a glimpse of how Andrew & Sarah built and grew a successful bootstrapped business from the ground up, and saw up close the power of content marketing.
People
It was a small team so I mostly just worked with the founders Andrew and Sarah. I’ve been following their story and cheering them on ever since.