About

I’m Charles Max Wood. I’ve been writing software for over 20 years and hosting podcasts for developers for 18 of them, across 25 shows and more than 4,600 episodes.

I studied computer engineering, but it didn’t really click for me until I was working at Mozy. A coworker and I built something to handle the support load coming in by email, and it kept growing. By the end it tracked what the support agents were working on, held a knowledge base, kept canned responses for the questions that came up over and over, and reported on phone calls and everything else.

That is still how I work. I run into a problem, build something for it, and it turns into more than I planned. It is also, twenty years later, close to what a lot of small businesses now want AI to do for them.

I’ve always had ideas about what I wanted my software to do. The AI work started small: using the tools to help me build the same kinds of apps I’d been building for 20 years. Then I started wiring pieces together for the podcasts. Better show notes. Titles that actually got found. The things I’d always wanted the media business to do and never had the hours to do by hand.

Once I saw what was possible there, I pointed it at everything else I cared about. Finding the parts of episodes I actually wanted to hear. Planning my time and getting to the things I said I’d get to. Understanding what the Utah legislature was doing. Each of those turned into something I’m still building, and none of them started as a business idea. They started as things I wanted to exist.

AI is a power tool. It lets people do in an afternoon what used to take months, and it’s already reshaping whole parts of the software industry I’ve spent my career in. I think that’s genuinely exciting, and I don’t think the excitement is misplaced. It’s also why I build with it: the leverage is real.

I also think about where it goes. These systems are going to change how we interact with almost everything, and the same capability cuts both ways. AI can give people more freedom to build what they want, and it can just as easily threaten it, depending on how it gets used by governments, or used on the data that governments and corporations have already collected about us. Most of the people who will write the rules about this have never built one of these systems, and that gap is not going to close on its own.

I have children. I want them to be more free than I am, and to have more room to build what they want to build than I had. That’s most of why I care about the policy side at all.

I’ve spent my career building software, so when I talk about what these systems can and can’t do, I’m describing things I’ve built rather than things I’ve read about. I’m also vice chair of the Utah County Republican Party, which is how I started paying attention to the legislative side at all.

What I can offer a policymaker isn’t a position on what the law should be. It’s a clear account of what they’re actually regulating, in terms that hold up. They make the decision. My job is making sure it’s an informed one.

So I do both. I build AI systems for people who need them working, and I explain how they actually behave to people who have to make decisions about them. Those feel like the same job to me.

Affiliations

Vice Chair, Utah County Republican Party

Top End Devs

I also run Top End Devs, a media business for software developers with 25 shows and an 18 year back catalog. It’s a separate company from Millwright and always has been. If you found me through a podcast, that’s why.

Contact

I’m at chuck@millwrightbench.com, and you can book a call if that’s easier.