About Jay Coughlan

Jay Coughlan is a graduate from BCIT’s Computer System’s Technology program and is a current Vancouver Film School alumnus with a diploma in Video Game Design. He’s been driven to work in the tech industry since he was young, inspired by his favourite hobby, video games. He attended Vancouver Film School hoping to get a job designing game’s like those he had played, and found an interest in programming and computer systems instead. This interest led him to attend BCIT where he learned to code in various languages, such as Java, C, C++, and HTML/CSS. He learned how object oriented languages functioned and how to design for them. In his second year at BCIT Jay entered the Digital Processing option where he learned about fourier transforms, how to read and write media files such as Jpeg and Wav, and how to manipulate the data to transform compression algorithms.

For the last 8 years, Jay had been working at Checkfront through many roles, including Technical Support Specialist, Technical Analyst Lead, QA Automation Engineer, and Jr Software Developer. At Checkfront he investigated and resolved technical issues with enthusiasm by using his deep knowledge of the product, wrote detailed testing steps and test plans with his experience of customer behaviour to guide his testing, and developed new features along with bug fixes with efficient, quality code. In doing so, Jay gained a lot of experience not only with software development, but with communicating across a wide array of different teams to explain changes, receive feedback, and discuss different needs across departments.

While Jay is looking for a new career opportunity, he is currently working on a new video game project, Neon Roar, with some like-minded individuals at Fenris Publishing. The game is a retro-style love letter to early sega genesis games, such as Golden Axe, Gradius, and Contra. The game was Kickstarted in 2022 and received over %125 of its funding goal and is looking for release in early 2027.

Beyond video games, Jay likes to read and write. His favourite books genres are fantasy, and he eagerly picks up new titles to burn through. Currently he’s reading the Noss Saga series by Joaquin Baldwin. Jay also loves dragons, whether it’s fighting them in Dungeons & Dragons or reading about them in books, or collecting dragon figures, those fantastical creatures inspire him and his creativity.