About Me

5 apps shipped to the App Store. Production platforms for real clients. Selected for the Apple Developer Academy's advanced Year 2 cohort — currently building in visionOS for healthcare on Apple Vision Pro.

George Clinkscales Jr.

My Story

I was born in Houston, went to college in Colorado, and worked in a wheat breeding lab at Colorado State extracting DNA to help farmers get the genetics they needed. After graduating I came to Michigan, and one weekend I went down to stay at Hostel Detroit. I stayed three weeks. The people I met there, from Germany, Afghanistan, Montreal, and Windsor, were so passionate about this city's history and architecture that it rubbed off on me. I moved here with no plan, working in restaurants and looking for a way forward.

That way turned out to be the MSU Apple Developer Academy. I'd never written code before September 2025. A year later I've shipped five apps to the App Store, co-founded CH Studios, built booking platforms for real businesses, and was selected for the Year 2 cohort to build a Vision Pro healthcare app. On the web side, I build production platforms with multi-tenant architecture, webhook-driven Stripe payments, admin dashboards, and AI integrations, taking products from idea to production and keeping them running.

What I've learned is that being a developer is more than typing code. It's talking to the people who'll actually use what you build, choosing the right tool for the job, and building for the problem, not for what looks flashy. My first-year mentor told us that if we worked hard, by the fifth challenge people would be asking to join our team. By the time we picked teams, I got to choose mine, and we built CoastCast.

You don't need to know everything. You need to know how to learn. Outside of work I'm usually on a bike, walking Detroit neighborhoods studying the architecture, or picking up whatever a project needs next.

Download Resume ↗ View My Work →

My Tech Journey

How I Work

I start by figuring out what "done" actually means before writing any code. Most problems that show up at launch were visible at kickoff - a missed edge case, an unclear requirement, a feature nobody asked for. I'd rather surface those in a conversation than debug them in production.

On client work I over-communicate. A short update before a client thinks to ask is always better than a long explanation after something breaks. Most "technical" problems are alignment problems in disguise.

I build with the user in front of me, not as an abstraction. Accessibility isn't a checklist - it's in the first prototype. Design should reduce friction, not add it. And the best implementation is the one the next developer doesn't have to untangle.

See it in practice →