About

Micah Hurst, smiling at an outdoor café table

I'm Micah Hurst. I've been building software for over two decades. It started in 2003 with an ecommerce site for a pharmacy in my hometown of El Reno, Oklahoma, the first of a string of small companies I built ecommerce apps for and then quietly kept running for years, usually on the side of a full-time engineering job.

Along the way I shipped production systems across startup and enterprise scale. My first mobile app was OState, the official app of Oklahoma State University, which at the time was the only app the university had. At HomeTown Ticketing (now serving 17,000+ schools and organizations), I designed and built all four of their production native ticketing apps nearly from scratch: iOS and Android, gate-side and customer-facing, including hardware ticket-printer and QR-code integration. At Quantum Health I was the lead mobile developer for three and a half years (and the mobile architect for part of that), and the sole maintainer of the production 1.0 iOS and Android apps for the entire time the 2.0 platform was being built.

In January 2025 I founded Elemental App Solutions to build on my own terms: bootstrapped, no investors. The long game is Elemental Sites, a platform meant to put real, owned software within reach of the people who usually can't get it: small businesses, and folks who want to build an app without signing their work away. It hasn't launched yet; contract work pays for the road.

I build with AI now, but carefully. Two decades in, what I've learned is that a demo is easy; the hard part is software that still works, and still makes sense, six months later. So I built a programming language, Arcana, so that AI-generated code gets checked for correctness before it ever runs. It's an open, public spec anyone can read.

I haven't lived in El Reno since I left junior college, though most of the years since have been somewhere in Oklahoma anyway, with a stretch in China and a while in Ohio along the way. Now I'm moving back home, and back to contracting full-time, which is the work I care about most. Different job titles over the years, but underneath them the work was always the same, getting good software to the people who actually need it. If you want to work together, get in touch.