Side projects I’ve built and use, mostly to learn something or because the tool I wanted didn’t exist yet.
A whisky collection and tasting-notes API built with Rust, Axum, and PostgreSQL, living in this monorepo. It's the project I use to actually write backend Rust instead of just reading about it: routing, data modelling, and a real schema, not a tutorial. What it taught me: Rust's type system forces a lot of decisions about your data shape up front, which is uncomfortable at first and then makes the rest of the code much harder to get wrong.
A small collection of standalone HTML tools, each one a single page that does one narrow job, built with a Python/uv build script and tested with Playwright. What it taught me: keeping a tool boring — no framework, no client-side build step beyond what uv needs — is usually the fastest way to end up with something I actually keep using.
Declarative configuration for my smart-home setup, versioned in this monorepo like any other codebase. What it taught me: treating home automation config with the same review and change-history discipline as application code catches mistakes long before they trip a light switch at 2am.
joostvanderlaan.nl itself — a Zola static site with Tailwind CSS layered on top, built and deployed from this monorepo. What it taught me: a personal site is a good forcing function for actually finishing small things end-to-end, from content to CSS to CI, instead of leaving them half-done.