I'm Allen.

I've spent 15 years building software and running software teams, at product companies and consultancies, across more industries than I can count. Most of what I know about how to build software, I learned by watching software get built badly. I curated the lessons into a working philosophy and made it the operating model for this company.

Lionshead is where that philosophy ships as product. It's a holding company for software platforms I build solo, using AI heavily (primarily Claude Code) alongside a curated stack of practices that take the usual reasons software fails off the table.

Every Lionshead product ships with the infrastructure I wish every product I'd worked on had from day one: trunk-based development, feature environments, blue/green and canary deployments, infrastructure as code, database migrations, OpenTelemetry, feature flags, isolated dev and production environments, secure secret storage, and extensive automated testing. The result is software that isn't a black box. If something breaks, I know first and fix it. If a feature is needed, I know first and build it. If a feature is dead, I know first and kill it.

The operating principles aren't aspirational. They're committed to source. “Code is ephemeral. Docs and tests define behavior.” Reliability is a process, not a value statement.

Coming first: Vesper. A platform for discovering and managing low-cost investment properties on the path to financial independence and early retirement.