Tom Chapman

I've never been able to leave a problem alone once I can see the shape of the fix. That's the whole explanation for everything below.

By day I'm a software developer in the automotive industry — real systems, real constraints, code that has to work when nobody's watching. That's the trade, and it's the through-line for the rest.

The rest is what happens when you can build your own tools. I got my insurance license and started an independent practice, then got tired enough of the software agents get handed that I started writing my own — quoting tools, a search index over Medicare regulations, back-office automation that does the parts I'd otherwise do badly at 11pm.

I buy and sell rural land, mostly owner-financed, and wrote my own listing scraper and comps pipeline rather than trust whatever a listing page claims an acre is worth.

And I build games — an Unreal Engine 5 shooter that's in public alpha with its own dedicated server, plus a handful of Minecraft plugins my kids actually play. One of them is a set of interest-bearing storage barrels I wrote to teach them saving, investing, and getting scammed, in roughly that order.

Underneath all of it is a homelab that I keep pointing at my own life: it triages my email, transcribes and summarizes my meetings, reads me a briefing in the morning, and answers questions against everything I've ever bothered to write down.

None of this is a side-hustle strategy. I just like building things, and the four businesses are what happens when that habit runs long enough.