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. That is long enough to see the same mistakes twice and get better at not making them a third time. These days I lead AI-powered engineering. I use AI, Google Cloud, Terraform, and Nix to make the fashion industry more efficient and transparent.
Before FashionUnited I spent seven years at the family trading firm J.M. Levarht & Zn. I digitalized production, quality inspection, and warehouse logistics. That meant barcode scanners, intranets, and apps we built ourselves.
The systems, the scale, and the shape of those twelve years are on the Work page, told as eras.
Outside of work I keep coming back to two things. I build small, useful tools from start to finish. And I read about how people actually change their behavior. That reading has been a better guide to shipping software with other people than most engineering advice.
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 is 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 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 collection is finished. I add to both when I find something worth writing down.
This site
This site is a plain Zola build with Tailwind CSS on top. There is no React, no client-side framework, and nothing to hydrate. Fonts are self-hosted, not pulled from a third-party CDN. I want the pages to load fast and stay legible.
The source lives on GitHub.