WEtech Alliance Summer Intern Ivy Wills will be traveling Windsor-Essex this summer in hopes of gaining valuable insight into career paths while documenting her experience and lessons in her blog “Ivy’s League”. Interested in welcoming Ivy to your tech company? Let us know!
My Visit to Coulter Software
To continue my journey visiting technical organizations in Windsor, I was invited to Coulter Software Inc. Here I interviewed Jay Coulter and had the opportunity to meet some of his employees. During the interview, Jay outlined the purpose of his growing company. From the title, one can expect that Coulter Software Inc. builds software. More specifically, they build mobile apps and websites to help provide data collection services to businesses. These services can help create solutions to well known client problems and integrate business and technology.
In order to ensure success, Coulter Software uses an agile working environment to allow clients to be heavily involved in the creation of their software. This process breaks down the creation of software into features that can be implemented one by one. It encourages the client to join daily and weekly updates to ensure that the software is going in the right direction. They also complete tasks from a backlog of items in short periods of productivity known as sprints.
Currently there are four full-time employees working at the company. Jay expressed that each employee is an experienced software developer with strong communication skills. Each employee is also open to learning new things and works hard to solve difficult problems on a daily basis. Employees mostly use Python to solve lower level problems and coming into the company employees should have the core knowledge needed to learn this language or have experience using Python.
Jay’s primary responsibility on a typical workday is to spend time with his team members in order to solve problems that occur and keep projects on task. He also communicates with clients, does some of the software development, and deals with administration tasks.
Coulter Software Inc. has three internal projects that they take pride in. The first one is OMS which stands for Orchard Management System. This is a mobile app that monitors the growth of hazelnut farms through lighting, soil quality, and other components. They also created BorderApp for faster border crossing using government data, google maps, and traffic cameras. This led to their third project, AVVID, which stands for Automatic Video Verification Identification & Detection. AVVID uses computer vision to detect and track objects. It sees inside images and video to determine what happens to them over time. This is hoped to have many applications and received a government grant.
Jay has made a difference in his community by hiring local graduates and taking on co-op students studying at local schools like St. Clair College and the University of Windsor. These individuals are expected to be excellent in the areas they claim to specialize in and to take pride in their work. Co-op students who take a position are given the opportunity to join the team fully and work on projects that directly benefit the company. This gives them the chance to learn what will be expected of them after they graduate.
This interview helped me along my journey by displaying a programming language I learned in school being used for mobile app and web development. It also showed me some of the skills I should focus on developing, including communication and problem solving.

Ivy Wills is a second-year computer science student at the University of Toronto Scarborough. She grew up in Windsor and is currently spending the summer here before her second year. Starting in her grade 12 year of high school, she joined her high school robotics team, the 5885 Wiredcats. Here she learned the basics of programming and developed an interest in machinery. Following grade 12, she developed her teaching skills leading a month-long introduction to robotics summer class to children in grades 3-4. During her first year of computer science, she learned different programming languages and developed an interest in game development.