Tom Schorn

I build software that holds up in real operation. From the database through the interface to the server everything runs on in the end.

For thirteen years I kept machines and plants running before moving into software development. The mindset stayed: I do not just build, I also operate.

Industrial electronics technician. Maintenance, PLC programming and commissioning in manufacturing, plus machine networking and IIoT.

When a plant stops, every minute costs money. That teaches you to chase a fault to its root cause instead of working around it.

Florabase is a platform for plant cultivation: monitoring sensor readings, flagging threshold breaches, documenting care. Plus AI-assisted diagnosis from a photo.

React and TypeScript on the front end, Python and FastAPI on the back end, PostgreSQL as the database. Built alone and running on my own infrastructure.

Next up: automation and IoT integration, so sensors and controllers talk to the platform directly. Later for organisations and external systems. This is exactly where my industrial experience meets the software.

In a Masterschool project I built an AWS environment with Terraform: a VPC with public and private subnets across availability zones, EC2, RDS with its own subnet group, security groups and routing. Described reproducibly instead of clicked together.

My own applications run on a self-managed Ubuntu server: Docker, reverse proxy, CrowdSec and monitoring. My homelab adds Proxmox for virtualisation and an Omada setup for the network. I know my systems because I operate them, not only because I write them.