About Us

Hi, I’m Nathan, founder of SearchTempest and AutoTempest.

Back in late 2006, I was doing my Master’s degree in electrical engineering in Waterloo, Ontario. It was a hot summer, and being a broke student, I was scouring craigslist for a used portable air conditioner on the cheap. Several times a day I would check the 5 or so craigslist cities within driving distance. I quickly grew impatient with this, likely because it was about 90 degrees in my apartment. 🙂 (32 for the other Canadians here.)

Now, the nice thing about a Master’s degree is that there’s only one deadline that really matters, and it’s not generally any time soon.  So I decided to take a bit of time and come up with a solution to my craigslist problem. Not knowing a thing about web design, I got a few books out of the library, and after some hard work, I came up with…. this!

Sweet, huh? 😉

Fortunately I eventually learned a few things, and more importantly got some help from a few fantastic developers who will introduce themselves below. We made a few improvements over the years, so today it’s a bit more presentable!

So, these days I do this stuff full time. This blog will mostly just have sporadic announcements regarding the sites themselves – new features, plans, decisions, etc., – but if you’re interested, we’ll also try to give you a bit of a behind the scenes perspective.

Matt

During a degree in Kinesiology, in between studying exercise physiology, psychology and standing on the side of rugby pitches in the rain waiting to stuff a tampon up the next bloody nose, I was fortunate enough to find something I really enjoyed doing – designing for the web. I love working with the rest of the Tempest Team to make the interfaces of our sites intuitive and enjoyable to use. Outside of my time here, I enjoy involvement within my church, riding bicycles quickly (road cycling is my current favourite), running some of the beautiful trails of Vancouver Island and time spent with family.

 Hey there, I’m Glen

I’m a software developer here at Tempest, working on maintaining and improving SearchTempest and AutoTempest.

I started out as a software developer many moons ago, took a decade-long detour to teach high school math, and now I’ve returned to my first love.

One of my first development machines was a $50k HP 735 with 144MB RAM, 2GB disk and 19″ monitor–today my $600 desktop has 16GB RAM, 1TB disk and dual widescreen monitors. I’m ok with the change 🙂

Outside of work I’ve been an enthusiastic whitewater kayaker and mountain biker, although these days my kids are my focus.

Hi, Tony here!

I started out as an accountant in my early careers. I played around with coding on my free time and I totally fell in love with it when a friend of mine showed me a poker app she made. I was inspired to make my own one day! Currently I’m a web developer here at Tempest working alongside  awesome teammates. Outside of work I’m a dedicated volleyball player, a part-time dog owner, and a casual hiker. 

Hey, I’m James

A fairly new addition to the team, I’m a full-stack developer who’s been loving working at Tempest since the beginning of 2017. My career has been a bit less varied than the majority of the team thus far, as I spent most of the last decade working at Queen’s University, until I caught a bit of a travel bug and moved out to the west coast after nearly 30 years in Eastern Ontario.

One year there seemed like enough, so I’m right back where I came from- but I sure am glad I made the trip, because I found Tempest while out there!

Hey there, I’m Brandon

 Another software developer here who loves working at Tempest!  I’ve been working here since the beginning of 2019 and have loved working with the team here so far.

I’m back in my hometown of Nanaimo, B.C after doing a ~2 year stint in Germany for 2017-2018, and have been enjoying the beautiful nature and west coast style living. I switched to a Computer Science major from Economics in college and haven’t looked back! In my spare time, when I’m not enjoying the great outdoors, I like to play board/card games and to watch sports with my wife.