Kevin Turnbull

It was through a combination of The Audio Recording Academy (TARA.ca), Ottawa Community Loan Fund (OCLF.org), Invest Ottawa (InvestOttawa.ca), N-VisionIT (betterwebsites.ca), Carleton University (carleton.ca) and many others that I have built the breadth of skills needed to provide high quality mentorship to my students. I'm very happy to have the resources necessary to excel at my job teaching and helping people get their projects finished. Among other great experiences; I was lucky to spend 5 years working with 2 former winners of Top 40 Under 40 awards as ranked by the Ottawa Business Journal as a project manager and lead developer within a contract web and mobile applications development firm.

While as a CodeMentor on this platform it's important that I've spent years working remotely with many teams of skilled developers, designers and system administrators to build a wide variety of tools for solving specific business challenges there's more to the story. I've also worked with musicians, event planners, studio managers and other artistic types in a wholey creative setting. While I do help with building marketing, sales and promotional websites my preference is for complex systems with multiple stakeholders exchanging highly detailed data. When these systems are designed and integrated really well – the labor savings or increased insights for the involved organizations can be huge.

Above it all; I'm a maker looking for a challenge. I have built Arduino microcontrollers speaking Bluetooth to native Android applications, set up commercial websites using all sorts of different CMS systems, set up hybrid web apps compiling to either iOS or Android and all sorts of complicated combinations of the above.

Lately; my work day typically consists of working directly with clients who are trying to solve a specific business concern or a hobbyist/entrepreneur working on a passion project. Often they just don't have the on-hand skillset to get it done and need a flexible helper who can step into many different rolls as needed for a project. You'll find that if we can agree on a project scope, price and deliverables that I'm very passionate about achieving the deadlines we agree on. I've worked separately as both lead developer on complex projects and project manager on similarly complex projects. This allows me to confidently estimate for how long work is likely to take. I try to provide buffer time for delays or mistakes; but if time does run low or there are competing objectives I make sure they're communicated early and risk points are identified.

During the academic season I like having the opportunity to work with new developers where I can help them to either understand then solve a problem or get an unnecessary roadblock out of the way so they can get back to solving the problem rather than fighting one of the many frustrations of learning how to think like a programmer.

I look forward to hearing more about your project and discussing how I can help make it into a reality.