Dave Penny grew up as a programmer in the 1970s with the HP-25C, the Commodore PET, and later Unix. He attended the University of Toronto graduating with a degree in Computer Science in 1985. He went on to graduate work where he taught and innovated new courses, and worked on a number of high-profile software projects, including Mini Tunis, Polyx, and the Object-Oriented Turing IDE. He graduated with a Ph.D. in 1992.
Dave went to work at IBM as a developer for a couple of years, but soon left to become the manager and then the VP Software Development and CTO of the fledgling Algorithmics Incorporated, which grew to over $100M in revenues in less than 5 years. From there he became a consultant and a professor for a few years, but then rejoined industry as a software exec in a series of software companies including Electronics Workbench, Ceryx, Ethoca, and Bluecat, all of which had successful exits. He even managed a stint as a VP at IBM for a couple of years.
Dave’s specialty is the management of software organizations. He is now mostly retired, but maintains a consulting practice and a presence on the web (https://www.modsoftman.com) and on YouTube (https://www.youtube.com/@modsoftman).