Hey, I'm Allen, a full-stack developer who builds things people enjoy using.

I've loved coding since I was seven, when I started making games in an old program called BYOND. Web development classes at Red River College turned that into a career, and my first real job was building Computers For Schools Manitoba a database app from scratch. It started as my own little PHP framework and grew into a Laravel application the whole organization ran on.

These days I'm the sole developer in the Manitoba Métis Federation's IT department, building applications for the other departments across the organization. I sit down with their directors and frontline staff, figure out what they actually need, and take it all the way through architecture, building, testing, deployment, and support. I run the infrastructure too, Coolify on a VPS, Docker Compose, nginx, and firewall rules that keep the internal stuff internal.

A big part of how I work now is with coding agents. They dig through codebases, plan and implement changes, refactor, run validation, and write documentation. I set the context and the guardrails, review every change, and I'm still the one responsible for the architecture and for what goes to production.

Outside of work I travel whenever I can, and I'm always on the hunt for a good bowl of ramen.