The Journey
My software engineering journey began in 2000, wiring early university mainframes. But my true fascination with AI started around 2006. While working full-time at BYU with a newborn at home, I took a senior-level AI class at Utah Valley University. After years of heavy COBOL, PeopleCode, C++, and Java, writing my first projects in C# was a revelation.
Our capstone project was creating a Chess AI engine. The rules were simple, but teaching the code to score the board, recognize good paths versus bad paths, and iterate over small wins to slowly improve the agent was mesmerizing. That semester, my agent won the class tournament. I was completely hooked.
In 2008, I saw the paradigm shift of native mobile computing, launched one of the first 2,000 apps on the Apple App Store (Paper Pilot, reaching 2M+ downloads), and founded Clever Coding. Over the next 15 years, I grew Clever Coding into an agency that shipped hundreds of production platforms, always keeping a pulse on the accelerating AI landscape (even writing about The AI Revolution for Silicon Slopes Magazine in 2018).
In late 2025, knowing we were hitting a new computing boundary, I decided to return to my roots. Armed with emerging AI coding agents—the modern descendants of that very first chess engine—I set out as a solo developer to build the definitive local-first AI system. The result is PocketCloud.