About Me

Most about pages lead with the résumé. I’d rather lead with the life, because the life is where the work comes from. I live in Plano, Texas with my wife Ann and our 11-year-old, and being a good husband and a good dad is the role I care most about getting right. Every morning starts the same way: over an hour walking the dog, just me and the sidewalk and whatever problem is currently rattling around in my head. Most of my best architecture decisions get made on those walks — and honestly, a few of my best life decisions too.

The rest of my time off the clock looks like this: a guitar that actually gets played, YouTube channels that need feeding, family trips to Europe whenever we can swing them, and a window seat on every flight because after all these years the view from 35,000 feet still hasn’t gotten old. My home office hums with machines, local Kubernetes clusters, and whatever new AI model dropped this month. The kid who fell in love with computers never left — he just got better equipment.

Public LinkedIn recommendations from clients, managers, and colleagues across two decades. Verify on LinkedIn.

Allan is an exceptional software engineer that can pick up the barest of requirements and knock it out of the park. He was able to navigate through several scrum teams and Dev environments to deploy enterprise analytics solutions across multiple sites and native apps that our in-house team struggled with. He’s easy to work with and a great communicator. If you’re looking for someone to get things done right and fast, Allan is your man.

Allan is a brilliant software engineer, and the amazing thing is that he can flip between tech speak into plain English so that everyone understands the process. He is a natural developer and stays with the project until it is done, and done right. His integrity and commitment to customer satisfaction is impressive.

Allan is a great guy to work with. He is sharp, insightful, and can jump into any job and get it done. Allan has a wealth of experience and knowledge and would be a great addition to any development team.

Allan exemplifies an extraordinary set of talents, values, morals, and people skills. He is truly a great individual to work with and get to know. His technical knowledge and background is astounding. Any company would be fortunate to have him on their team.

Allan is the consummate professional. He was brought into our firm after a management shakeup to get a handle on what the projects were and where they were going. In a short time he had delivered that and more. Allan is a hard worker with the highest level of integrity. I would strongly recommend him for any project.

I started writing software professionally at 19. Microsoft recruited me to Redmond to work on the Visual C++ compiler team for the PowerPC architecture. Not long after, I was hand-picked for one of Bill Gates' pet projects: Visual Basic for Windows CE. I wrote portions of the runtime in C.

That was 1994. Since then I've spent decades shipping production software for Microsoft, IBM (twice), Koch Industries, Fiserv, FM Global, Bell Helicopter, Thomson Reuters, Pioneer Natural Resources, National Oilwell Varco, SiriusXM, Verizon, and American Airlines — among others. Today I run Leopard Data, an independent consultancy out of Plano, TX, and I build AI-first systems for enterprise teams who need a hands-on architect — not a slide-deck consultant.

Technical Expertise

AI & Machine Learning

AI is the center of how I architect and ship today — not a feature I bolt on the side. Every system I design now starts from the question of where AI accelerates the work and where it creates risk. Grade My Investments, my own SaaS platform, is the working proof — three Claude models routed by task, an ML.NET grading engine, token-aware server-side billing, and AI file analysis pipelines all running in production.

Professional Philosophy

I'm not here to write clean code. I'm here to ship production systems that solve real business problems on a budget that respects the client.

The way I do that in 2026 is by molding Anthropic's Claude Code and my own engineering judgment into a single working team. Claude is a fast, tireless, encyclopedic pair-programmer. I'm the architect, the editor, and the person who knows when to override it. Used together, we ship in weeks what teams of ten used to ship in years. That's the discipline — knowing where AI accelerates you and where the human has to step in.