I am a world-class software developer living in Atlantic Canada. My early career was focused on iOS development, but my area of interest broadened until I could do many things. I'm interested in TypeScript, ReactNative, and GraphQL. I'm married with two cats. I'm a prolific open source contributor, I've written books, and I've made photos.
Community is incredibly important to me; I’ve only been able to accomplish what I have because of the kindness and generosity of others. I owe it to the people who helped me to help others now, which is why I volunteered with Coalition for Queens and ran a Peer Lab every week in New York for five years.
If you want to get in touch, Mastodon is probably the best way to reach me. You can also email ash@ashfurrow.com.
Over my career, I’ve been fortunate to work at some amazing places.
Wealthsimple
I joined Wealthsimple in late 2025 to leverage my deepest specialty, crafting high-quality mobile user experiences. This is still early days, but you can expect big things.
Float
I joined Float in 2023 following my search for a quality team building worthwhile products with interesting technology. My first role was to lead development of the Float mobile application. After the initial launch, I leveraged my past experience leading mobile-first product teams to set up the entire Product Engineering organization for mobile development. After two years, I left Float in 2025.
Working in a Series A startup gave me the autonomy to drive changes across any part of the technical stack – and to drive changes in the company's culture. Empathy helped me understand our customers, experience helped me scale up our platform, and intuition helped me identify and execute on the most important thing at any given time. I'm proud of what I built and I'm grateful to have had the chance to work with such a talented team.
Shopify
The ecommerce products I'd helped build at Artsy catered to the fine art market. Shopify, in contrast, is working to "make commerce better for everyone." It was the everyone in that mission that resonated with me.
After joining Shopify, I worked on the Shop app. My deep expertise in React Native allowed me to push myself in many directions; my role as Senior Staff Developer afforded me the autonomy to decide where I would drive the most impact.
My largest contribution was Shop Minis, a React Native SDK for third parties to build native-quality shopping experiences. I held the technical vision for the SDK, even as the Shop app itself was iterating towards product-market fit. First I started building the SDK on my own, then I built up a team to deliver our internal prototype, then finally I oversaw two teams delivering a private alpha to launch partners. You can read more about the public SDK launch here.
Artsy
I joined Artsy in New York to help accomplish their ambitious goal: a future where art is as popular as music. That vision resonated with me, and for seven years I was proud to work towards it. After building Artsy software in TypeScript, Swift, Objective-C, Ruby, Scala – whatever it took – I moved to technical leadership. I am most proud of leading the migration to Artsy's mobile-first product strategy.
Most of the code I worked on is open source and I wrote a lot on Artsy's Engineering Blog.
Teehan+Lax
After learning the importance of design at 500px, I moved to Canada’s leading design agency, Teehan+Lax, to learn more. I developed keen collaboration skills while working closely with designers and clients to realize outstanding products.
500px
500px was a site that aimed to host the world’s best photography. Like Flickr, but only for your best shots. I developed their first iPad app, and later led the iOS team to ship the new universal app.