PITTSBURGH, September 25 — Scott Pulkowski has a simple test for whether a piece of software deserves to exist: if it annoys him, he rebuilds it. That instinct is how NertRush came to be. Pulkowski, a functional consultant and indie app developer from Sewickley, Pennsylvania, was profiled by Technical.ly on September 24 in its “How I Got Here” series on career journeys in the innovation economy.
The story, written by Alice Crow and edited by Katie Malone, traces a path from a childhood spent building computers and websites to a day job helping businesses build custom software systems — with personal apps filling his free time.
A card game, a broken app, and a promise to a sister
The NertRush project started with a small frustration. Pulkowski tried to show the card game Nerts to a friend who was unable to purchase the app’s remove-ads feature. He assumed the original developer was no longer active and could not accept new license agreements, which meant products could no longer be sold.
The free version had its own problem: closing the game and returning to it would not let the player resume. So he told his friend and his sister he would remake the game without those annoying features.
His reason is about as practical as it gets — Nerts is his go-to game on an airplane. Nerts itself is a popular card game, and NertRush is his digital version of it. Think of it like a favorite board game that has been out of print for years: the pieces still work, but nobody is minding the store.
From a controller’s lag to a Mac utility
InputOC, another recent project, came from a similar frustration. When Pulkowski plugs a controller into his laptop, it is limited to 250 hertz even though he plays at 4,000 hertz. He described the difference as massive and the result as unplayable, so he decided to build a solution.
InputOC lets USB devices respond faster on Mac. Both apps follow the same logic.
Pulkowski said he is building these things for himself and hopes somebody else will like them as well.
What he tells other builders about AI
Pulkowski’s day job and his side projects have given him a clear read on where the action is. He said the real development and platform to build for right now is the AI space — building micro tools, gaining experience, and then taking lessons from little tools and agents to build bigger and bigger projects. His advice for anyone who keeps doing the same task over and over is blunt.
If you are doing the same activity multiple times, day after day, you should build a tool for it and stop doing it yourself. He first dabbled with AI tools in 2023 while doing Python coding, found them pretty good then, and said where the technology has gotten since is insane.
He described himself as definitely a power user and started using Claude about two years ago because it was the best at the time. The same tools changing day-to-day tech work, he said, are also helping technologists pursue passions outside the typical nine-to-five.
The longer arc
None of this happened overnight. Pulkowski began building computers and websites as a child, and in high school he developed his first app with a friend: Yinzer, a Pittsburghese dictionary that played pronunciations of words in the regional dialect. He said having internet access and the ability to research and teach himself anything was fundamental, because once you teach yourself how to teach yourself and how to learn new things, you can figure out how to do almost anything.
He started a digital agency with that friend soon after and worked with clients throughout college, graduating from Duquesne University in 2015 with a degree in entrepreneurship. He later took a corporate job, where he learned Salesforce — a platform for managing a business’s interactions with customers — setting the career path he still follows.
For readers wondering what to watch next, Pulkowski’s own roadmap is the tell. He is treating small AI tools as practice rounds, with the stated goal of scaling up to bigger projects — the same way a dictionary app in high school led to an agency, a career, and now a card game he can finally play on a plane.
