Allen is a technical product leader who runs Forestwalk Labs in Vancouver. He’s obsessed with customers, product, design, LLMs, writing, and teams – among other things.
Work History
Forestwalk Labs, CEO and Co-founder, 2024 – present
- Founded a venture-backed startup building delightful tools for teams using AI
- Builds full stack, from design to DNS, mostly in TypeScript
- Pushes the limits of both coding agents and customer-facing AI inference
- Writes code, interviews customers, and changes light bulbs
Steamclock Software, CEO and Co-founder, 2010 – 2024
- Founded and grew a profitable consulting studio from 2 to 16 people
- Led teams that have shipped dozens of top-notch iOS and Android apps
- Hired and developed a team of skilled designers, developers, and leaders
- Wrote Swift, did UX design, and managed projects as we built our team
- Guided culture, strategy, finances, hiring, and product
Royal Pixel Service, Co-founder, 2018 – 2023
- Led a small team doing prototyping and research for new products
- Led development of Two Spies, a highly rated mobile game featured by Apple
Apple, Software Engineer, 2008 – 2010
- Worked on the iWork team (Pages, Numbers, Keynote)
- Wrote JavaScript for the first single-page iWork web product
- Wrote Objective-C for iWork ’09 for Mac and iWork for iPad
Discovery Software, Software Developer, 2003 – 2008
- Wrote and iterated a custom CRM system using PHP and SQL
- Developed a web-based memorization product in JavaScript
- Handled consulting projects, performed QA, and various other hats
Self Employed, Web Contractor, 2003
Uniserve, CS Rep and intranet developer, 2001 – 2003
Radical Entertainment, Work experience student, 2001
Independent Work
- Writes monthly articles on lessons learned, reaching 100K+ annual readers
- Hosted and produced three podcasts, including It Shipped That Way
- Hosted and spoke at various technical meetups and conferences
- Developed a variety of games and side projects
- Taught the 4th year Web Applications course for SFU Computing Science