I left Pittsburgh when I was twenty-something with a backpack, a tight budget, and a one-way ticket to Southeast Asia. What started as a gap year turned into several years of living in China, Thailand, and Vietnam, eating street food for a dollar, learning Mandarin badly, and writing about all of it on this blog.
I thought I knew exactly what I was coming home to.
I was wrong.
The City I Left vs. The City I Found
When people think of Pittsburgh, they usually picture steel mills, bridges, and the Steelers. That’s the version I grew up with and honestly the version I carried in my head for years while I was away. It was a comfortable, familiar image of a city that felt like it had already figured out its identity and wasn’t in a huge rush to change it.
Coming back after years of living in cities like Chengdu and Chiang Mai, I expected to feel like I was stepping back in time. Instead I felt weirdly out of the loop.
The neighborhood I grew up in had new coffee shops I didn’t recognize. Friends who stayed behind were working at companies I’d never heard of. The conversations at dinner were about product launches, UX sprints, funding rounds, and hiring pipelines. At one point someone casually mentioned that Pittsburgh had quietly become one of the more interesting mid-sized tech cities in the country, and I genuinely thought they were joking.
They were not joking.
What I Missed While I Was Away
Living abroad gives you a strange kind of tunnel vision. You get very good at observing the place you’re in, but you completely lose track of the place you’re from. I knew exactly which street stalls in Saigon served the best pho before 7am. I could navigate the Chengdu metro in Mandarin. I had opinions about the best beaches in southern Thailand.
Meanwhile, back home, Pittsburgh was quietly building something.
I started doing what I always do when I’m curious about something: I talked to people and I read everything I could find. And one thing that kept coming up, especially in conversations about product design and software development, was how many small, focused firms had grown up here without making a lot of noise about it.
One of the names that kept appearing in those conversations was ROKET, an app design and development firm based in Pittsburgh with a presence in Cleveland too. They had been around since 2014, which means they were quietly doing their thing for years while I was eating noodles in a wet market somewhere in Yunnan province.
Why ROKET Stuck With Me
I’ll be honest: I came across a lot of companies during this whole process of relearning my own city. Most of them sounded more or less like each other. Big teams, big promises, generic portfolios of apps that all looked the same.
ROKET was different in a way that actually made sense to me given where I’d spent the last several years.
Traveling on a tight budget teaches you something that most people figure out eventually but travelers learn fast: the best experiences almost never come from the biggest operations. The best meal I had in Beijing was from a guy with a cart and one recipe he’d been perfecting for thirty years. The best guesthouse I stayed at in northern Thailand had six rooms and an owner who remembered your name.
ROKET operates with that same logic, though applied to software. They deliberately keep their client load small, they put their two founders, Alex and David, directly on every project, and they focus on doing the full thing properly rather than handing pieces off to whoever is available. Their portfolio covers a genuinely wide range of work: IoT apps for agriculture, construction software for major firms, mental health platforms built in partnership with universities, consumer electronics ecosystems launched at CES.
What struck me wasn’t just the range. It was the fact that each project had a coherent story behind it, a real problem being solved, a real client relationship. That’s actually rarer than it sounds in an industry full of agencies that treat projects like assembly lines.
The Parallel I Didn’t Expect to Find
Here’s the thing about coming home after a long time abroad. You don’t just observe your city with fresh eyes. You also observe it through the lens of everything you absorbed while you were away.
I spent years in places where people built businesses with almost nothing. A food vendor in Vietnam running a decades-old family recipe out of a sidewalk setup. A guesthouse owner in Chiang Mai who designed the whole guest experience himself because he couldn’t afford to hire anyone. A tailor in Shanghai who had every regular customer’s measurements memorized.
The common thread in all of those people was that they had a deep craft, they did it themselves, and they built real relationships with the people they served.
ROKET reminded me of that. Not because building apps is the same as running a street food cart, obviously it isn’t, but because the philosophy underneath felt similar. Do fewer things. Do them properly. Stay close to the work and close to the client. Don’t scale past the point where quality starts to slip.
Coming from years of watching that approach work in wildly different contexts across Asia, seeing it applied to a software firm in my own hometown felt like something I could actually get behind.
Pittsburgh Is Not the City I Left
I’ve been back for a while now and I’m still adjusting to the gap between the Pittsburgh I remembered and the Pittsburgh that actually exists today. There are robotics companies, AI research labs, serious design firms, and product studios scattered across a city that used to be defined almost entirely by its industrial past.
None of this happened overnight. While I was documenting budget travel in Southeast Asia, people here were quietly building things. Some of those things are pretty interesting.
ROKET is one of them. Not because they’re loud about it. Actually the opposite. They’ve been doing good work in a city full of good work, and most of the people outside Pittsburgh still haven’t heard of them.
That feels familiar somehow. Some of the best things I found while traveling were the things nobody was advertising. The unmarked noodle shop. The guesthouse with no website. The local guide who knew everything but had no business card.
Good work tends to speak for itself eventually. It just takes someone coming home with fresh eyes to notice it.
A Note for Anyone Thinking About Building Something
If you’re sitting on an app idea, or you run a business that needs a digital product and you’re not sure where to start, I’d genuinely suggest looking beyond the obvious big-name agencies. There are firms like ROKET doing serious work in cities you might not think to look in, with the kind of focused attention that larger shops simply can’t offer once they’ve scaled past a certain point.
Pittsburgh surprised me. Maybe it’ll surprise you too.