I’m Joost van der Laan, based in the Randstad, the Netherlands. Since 2013 I’ve built software at FashionUnited, a B2B media and data platform for the fashion industry — long enough to see the same mistakes twice and get better at not making them a third time. These days that means leading AI-powered engineering: using AI, Google Cloud, Terraform, and Nix to make the fashion industry more efficient and transparent.
Before FashionUnited I spent seven years at family trading firm J.M. Levarht & Zn., digitalizing production, quality inspection, and warehouse logistics — barcode scanners, intranets, and internally built apps.
What those twelve years at FashionUnited actually involved — the systems, the scale, the shape of the work — deserves more than a line here; the Work page tells it as eras.
Outside of that, I keep coming back to two things: building small, useful tools end-to-end, and reading about how people actually change their behavior — which turns out to be a better guide to shipping software with other humans than most engineering advice is.
What I build
- Whisky Collection API — a Rust/Axum API for tracking a whisky collection, built in this monorepo.
- tools.joostvanderlaan.nl — standalone HTML tools, each one a single page that does one thing.
- Home Assistant infra — my home automation setup, configured declaratively and kept in version control like everything else here.
How I think
Two ongoing collections sit behind most of what I build and write:
- Mental models — short notes on models I actually use when thinking through a problem.
- Behaviour change — notes on why intentions don’t reliably turn into habits, and what does.
Neither is a finished body of work. Both get added to as I find something worth writing down.
This site
This site is a plain Zola build with Tailwind CSS on top — no React, no client-side framework, nothing to hydrate. Fonts are self-hosted rather than pulled from a third-party CDN. That’s a deliberate choice, not a limitation: fast and legible beats clever, and a site about thinking clearly should not ship the opposite.
The source is open at github.com/javdl/joost.
Get in touch
- GitHub — github.com/javdl
- LinkedIn — [TODO jlnl-wcy: profile URL — publishing it is confirmed, the URL itself is still needed]