Hi, I’m Foster

My dad is a software engineer. He sat me down in front of some code when I was twelve, and I hated it. Not “found it hard.” Actively disliked it. I came away fairly certain I’d be doing something, anything, other than what my dad did.

So I went to BYU planning on electrical engineering. The intro computer science class was a requirement, and I took it expecting to get it over with. Instead I loved it. It turned out the thing I’d bounced off at twelve was the thing I wanted to do all day at twenty-one. I switched majors and graduated in June 2026 with a BS in computer science.

Along the way, three things happened that turned into the work on this site.

1. 01

   I worked in a research lab

   At BYU’s Family History Technology Lab I led the engineering on a project studying whether reading your own ancestors’ stories measurably improves how you feel. We rebuilt a half-finished app, ran a 600-person randomized controlled trial, and published the result at an international conference. It was the first time I had to treat “is this actually working” as a question with an answer.

   Read the Stories case study →
2. 02

   I co-founded a business and sold to real customers

   I co-founded Harkelo and served as its CTO, building a multi-tenant platform that gives museum visitors a guided, personalized visit without a docent. I owned the architecture: cloud infrastructure, the data model, authentication, real-time group sessions, subscription billing. We shaped the product through demos with six Utah museums, and after six months of building, two museums were paying to use it, one in Utah and one in California. Selling to someone who has a budget and alternatives turned out to be a very different education from building the thing.

   Read the Harkelo case study →
3. 03

   Someone asked me for a website, and I had a blast

   I got connected with an owner who wanted a real site for her vacation rental, not a template: something that could take bookings and payments directly. I built it: the calendar, the Stripe checkout, the guest messaging, the admin dashboard, the SEO. And I enjoyed it more than I expected to. Watching a small business get something that just works, and get it quickly, was more satisfying than anything else I’d worked on.

   Read the Clover Creek case study →

That third project is the one I kept thinking about. There are a lot of good businesses around here, people who are excellent at what they do, running on a Facebook page, a phone number, and word of mouth. Not because they decided a website wasn’t worth it, but because getting one has somehow become a project: agencies quoting five figures, template builders that look fine until someone opens them on a phone, and a pile of jargon between you and the thing you wanted.

Getting a decent website shouldn’t be this hard. That’s the whole reason I do this. I want it to be possible for everyone, not just the businesses that can absorb an agency retainer.

If you want to see how a project runs before you talk to anyone, the process page walks through all nine steps, the portfolio has the work itself, and every price is on the services page.