Brian Wielhouwer
I spent my career doing work where being wrong had consequences. Now I build software for the people still doing it, and websites for the businesses in the town I live in.
Explosive Ordnance Disposal.
EOD is a job with no margin. You approach something built to kill you, and you either get it right or you do not get a second look at it. The work is slow, procedural, and unglamorous. You follow the steps because the steps are what keep you alive.
That is the habit I never lost. I do not ship software that guesses. I do not hand a client something I have not tested. When I tell someone a thing works, I have checked it.
Compass Line Ventures is a certified Service-Disabled Veteran-Owned Small Business and Veteran-Owned Small Business through the SBA, active in SAM.gov.
The reports were the worst part of the job.
Every officer knows the feeling. The call is over, the scene is clear, and now you are sitting in front of a screen at the end of a long shift trying to turn what happened into a narrative that will hold up in court. It takes hours. It is the part nobody trains you for and the part that follows you home.
That is why S.I.R.S. exists. It takes the facts an officer has already entered and organizes them into a clean report narrative. It does not listen to your body camera. It does not fill in details it was not given. It never writes a fact that was not already yours.
That line is not marketing. It is the reason I built it the way I did.
See S.I.R.S. →
Certified North Carolina firefighter since 2020.
I ran with a volunteer department in this area from 2020 to 2024. Volunteer fire is a specific kind of commitment. You are not paid to be there, you have a day job, and the pager still goes off at two in the morning.
What you see in that world, and in law enforcement, is that the job does damage nobody talks about. There is a culture of taking it home and saying nothing, and the resources that exist are usually written by people who have never run a call.
Code 4 came out of that. It is a mental wellness app built specifically for first responders, with clinical self-assessments, short grounding tools that work on a shift, and a peer connection layer. It is live on Google Play.
See Code 4 →Compass Line Ventures.
I run Compass Line Ventures out of New Bern. It does two things. It builds custom software, mostly for first responders and youth-serving nonprofits. And it builds websites for local businesses here in Eastern North Carolina.
Those sound like different businesses. They are the same one. Both are about taking something a person does every day and making the tooling around it less painful. A salon owner reconciling tips by hand and an officer retyping a narrative at midnight have more in common than either would guess.
There is no team. You work with me. That is a limitation and it is also the entire point.
If any of that sounds like your situation, let's talk.
No pitch deck. A short call to figure out whether there is anything here worth building.