Dottid Spotlight: Daniel Cender
Explain your role and what you do at Dottid.
I'm a senior software engineer here at Dottid, where I lead one of our engineering teams in creating features to improve how we empower users to manage their property assets. Day to day, I get involved with a good blend of everything: I write and test code, both for our app and in our services that support it. I meet with team members in our Product department to pick apart designs for upcoming work in the near months. I then take that and write out the code tasks that my team will need to complete before we can release the product updates. Throughout all that, I try to do my best to be on-call to help coworkers with coding problems. The best thing I can do is keep my team unblocked and moving forward.
How long have you been at Dottid? Has the platform or company changed - if so, how?
I've been with Dottid now for about a year and a quarter. My first impression upon hearing of the company and market-fit was skepticism, but after joining and assimilating with the team, I realized we had a great set of minds working here - individuals who had researched the field well. The Engineering and Product teams have grown quite a bit since I got here. Though some folks have come and gone, we went from one Engineering team to three, and Product now has the bandwidth to handle work on multiple feature lines at the same time. We can design and develop faster than ever before. As the company has grown, we transitioned from having everyone in Dallas to having team members working from many states. Looking at the year as a whole, my team collaborates remotely for probably 95% of our working hours.
Let’s talk technology and commercial real estate (CRE). Do you believe Dottid is making moves in terms of tech and digital transformation in CRE?
I think it's easy to think that CRE has a limited sphere of technology, but that’s just not the case. There are giant behemoths at play here – this all puts us in a great position to be the fast-pivoters in the space. We have a very low center of gravity, as far as tech companies go. This is one of our strengths – especially in terms of meeting customers’ needs as they (our customers) grow with us.
“I think it's easy to think that CRE has a limited sphere of technology, but that’s just not the case. There are giant behemoths at play here – this all puts us in a great position to be the fast-pivoters in the space.”
What’s one of the things you like most about working at Dottid?
The opportunity for personal and professional growth is a huge part of what I enjoy about my role. In my opinion, I’m hardly an expert – but, I have the space and trust to make safe mistakes and adapt as we go through our work cycles.
Startups have a reputation for being high-pressure environments - they can even be chaotic. This being said, what’s it like working with the Dottid Team?
We understand building this company and product is a marathon, not a sprint. Everyone here is balancing a great work ethic and genuine enjoyment in this journey together.
What are some of your aspirations for the next year (at Dottid or outside of it)? Do you have any hobbies or favorite pastimes?
I would love to help Dottid build some more productivity tool integrations. I would love to get into a few AutoCAD and coding tools for learning to create digital scenes and playing with some game development. That's been a long interest of mine.
I enjoy some classic nerd, developer things, like playing online games with close friends. Aside from uthat, I enjoy reading (both fiction and non-fiction), audiobooks, playing guitar and hiking when I can.