Welcome!

My name is Dave Penny. I’ve spent over 40 years in software, as a programmer, professor, consultant and executive. For the last two decades of that I was the top technology executive at growing Toronto-area software companies, including Algorithmics, Ceryx, Ethoca and BlueCat. I also spent time as a VP at IBM, leading international teams. I was fortunate to be part of five successful exits, with acquirers including IBM and Mastercard. For more details, see my LinkedIn profile.

Boards and CEOs usually brought me in when the software organization needed an overhaul. What I learned doing that, about planning, estimation, hiring and architecture, is what this site and my YouTube channel @modsoftman are about.

Teaching has run alongside all of it. I earned my B.Sc., M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Computer Science at the University of Toronto, and later joined its faculty as an Associate Professor. Over the years I developed or rebuilt six of its courses, including Programming on the Web (CSC309), Software Design and Architecture (CSC407) and Software Engineering (CSC444), which I taught for nearly a decade using a textbook I wrote for it.

Today my focus is agentic software development: using AI coding agents to build durable commercial software with the same engineering discipline a highly-functional software company would expect. Everything I’ve ever known about architecture and software engineering remains essential.