About

Ty Johnston

Founder & Lead Engineer, Fopull LLC. Knoxville, TN.

Coding
Since 2018, 8 years and counting
Studio
Fopull LLC, founded 2024
Ty Johnston
Ty Johnston Founder and engineer, Fopull LLC

In my own words

I founded Fopull LLC to do the kind of software work I actually want to do: thoughtful, honest, end to end. I write everything from the database up: Laravel, Unity, Rust, infrastructure, the boring middle.

The studio ships its own software as proof. Floptle is a game engine in Rust with a managed multiplayer service behind it. Fontelle is a DAW. Storage Sifter is a disk-usage tool for Linux. Foduel is a card game with its own rules engine, and Foverse is the community platform the games live in. All of it runs on hardware I own, behind a tunnel, and the incidents are written up in public.

Client work is the other half. It is the same engineering applied to somebody else's problem: a written plan first, then a system built and run by the person who wrote the plan. Outside of that I make music and put videos on YouTube.

The hardware in the room

Everything on fopull.com runs on machines I own and can put a hand on. Photographed 15 September 2026.

The fopsver host with its side panel off: a Ryzen build, a 500 W EVGA supply and the ServeRAID card in the x16 slot
fopsver. Proxmox on the metal, this site in one VM, a ServeRAID M5015 in the x16 slot for the drive enclosure that is being built.
A hand-soldered green PCB with a Raspberry Pi Pico, resistors and a screw terminal, the Pico's LED lit
The enclosure's cooling controller, a board I designed and soldered: a Pico reads drive temperatures from the host and drives the fans, and ramps to full if the host goes quiet.

What the studio holds to

Scope in writing
A plan you can read before anything is built, and take anywhere.
Own the whole system
Schema, API, frontend, deploy, backups, on-call. One person who can answer for all of it.
Ship in public
The products are open source or free to use, and the ops log is published.
Hand over runbooks
Every system leaves with the notes to run it without Fopull.