I get software teams shipping.
I find what is slowing your team down and fix it with them. It starts with a fixed-price assessment that takes two to three weeks and ends with a written report and a 90-day plan.
Colin Campbell, Toronto. Twenty years building software and leading engineering teams. I still ship production software myself, using AI agents. I take a small number of assessments each quarter, for owners and acquirers of software companies in Canada and the US.
Call me when
- You run a business and want AI to help.You have heard what it can do. You need someone to find where it pays off for you, then build it and keep it running.
- You want an app built and don’t know where to start.You need someone to say what to build first, and then build it.
- Your team is busy and nothing ships.Releases slip, good people have gone quiet, and nobody can explain why.
- You bought AI tools and nothing changed.Everyone has a coding assistant. Output is flat, or the bug count is up.
- You are buying a software business.You need to know what you are getting, what it costs to run, and who holds the knowledge.
What changes when I work with your team
- More releases
- Releases become routine. A finished change reaches your customers automatically. You iterate every week and nobody dreads release day. Five times the deploys and 60% fewer incidents at Wavelo.
- Lower costs
- You stop paying for things that don’t earn their place. I cut tools that cost a lot and give little, and keep the ones worth the money. Sometimes that means open source, sometimes a paid product. The system gets simpler and cheaper to run. A few thousand dollars a year at a startup, eight figures a year at a public company. The habit is the same at any size.
- No disruption
- Big changes your customers never feel. Migrations and refactoring happen in small, safe steps while the business keeps running. Your support line stays quiet. More than 2 million domains migrated at Hover with no disruption to the people relying on them.
- Less risk
- Decisions you can undo. I choose options that are cheap to reverse and test the risky parts first. A wrong call costs a week instead of a year. Delivery 40% faster from prototyping before committing. It also leaves you with a codebase that AI agents can work in safely.
Your best engineers stay. Most stuck teams are good people worn down by friction. I coach them and clear what is in their way, and shipping becomes fun again.
Check out the principles I work by. There are many like them, but these ones are mine.
The Engineering Assessment
In two to three weeks you know what is slowing your team down and what to do about it. I work alongside your team and review the system, not the people. The report is in plain English, and the 90-day plan is yours to use with or without me.
- Length
- Two to three weeks
- Price
- Fixed, agreed up front
- You receive
- Report, readout, 90-day plan
- How work gets from idea to production
- Code and architecture health
- Hosting, reliability and running costs
- Team structure, morale and key-person risk
- Where AI helps and where it adds defects
- Security and compliance gaps
- What to fix first and what to leave alone
- Budget and staffing for 90 days
Afterwards I can stay on to carry out the plan with your team, through weekly working sessions, code review and coaching for your leads. That work is month to month. Interim engineering leadership is available on a limited basis.
A lifetime of building software
I started programming at eight and never stopped. These are live today.
- WakefullyMobile app
Designed, built and run end to end.
- Turnstile StubsMobile app
A social archive for ticket stubs. Co-founded as CTO.
- GetWorkPaidWeb app
Helps small businesses get paid for the work they already do.
- Hover, OpenSRS and WaveloPlatforms
Nine years at Tucows, from team lead to Director of Engineering.
Recruiters: I also take interim and contract engineering leadership roles. Here is my resume.
“I watched him transform the way we wrote and deployed software, from a mess of buggy code, stressed operations people, and hostile gatekeepers, into a smooth end-to-end process that lets people be successful and focus on delivering value to customers.”
“I cannot recommend Colin highly enough. Though I’m hesitant to do so because selfishly, I want him all to myself.”
Get in touch
Tell me the size of your team and what is stuck. I reply within two business days.