Hi, I’m Robbert. I write and talk about technology for a living. And then, when I have some time left, I write about interesting stuff some more.
That probably tells you something about me. My daily work revolves around technology, digital transformation, cybersecurity, datacenters, cloud computing, industrial innovation and the people and companies behind all those developments. I talk to engineers, entrepreneurs, researchers and technology experts, visit events, conduct interviews and spend a considerable amount of time trying to understand where technology is taking us.
But professional writing comes with assignments, audiences, deadlines and editorial choices. Just Me is different. This is one of my side projects. My own little corner of the internet where I can follow my curiosity wherever it happens to take me. And it tends to take me in quite a few directions.
I might write about artificial intelligence one day and an obscure little website I discovered the next. There is space technology here, industrial technology, sustainability, music, open source software and digital autonomy. Sometimes I write about a new tool I have started using. Sometimes I build a small tool myself. And sometimes I simply come across something that makes me think: this is interesting. I want to know more about this. That is usually enough reason for a post.
My own little piece of the internet
I like personal websites. There is something wonderfully old-fashioned — and at the same time surprisingly modern — about having a place on the internet that is actually yours. Not a profile on somebody else’s platform. Not a stream of posts controlled by an algorithm. Not a place where you have to wonder whether the rules will suddenly change next month. Just a website. Your website.
That idea has become increasingly important to me. Over the years, I have become more interested in digital autonomy, open source software and alternatives to the large technology ecosystems most of us have become accustomed to. I experiment with those alternatives myself. Linux is my daily operating system. I use open-source software wherever it makes sense—which, in my case, is for practically everything I do. I have moved away from almost all of the Big Tech products I used for years and regularly try smaller, independent or European alternatives.
Sometimes they are better. Sometimes they are worse. Sometimes they are simply different. And that is fine. I am not interested in finding the one perfect collection of tools that everybody should use. I am much more interested in the fact that we have choices — and in finding out what happens when you actually make different ones.
I like making small tools
Writing is a large part of what I do, both professionally and here. But I also like building things. Nothing particularly grand. A little web tool that solves a problem I keep running into. A different way of organising information. A script. An illustration. A new section for this website. Something that did not exist yesterday and does today.
Quite often I start building something simply because I wonder whether I can. That also explains why Just Me will probably never be finished. I keep changing things. Adding things. Removing things. Trying another approach. Occasionally breaking something and then spending considerably more time fixing it than I would like to admit. That’s part of having your own website, I suppose.
Mostly, I am curious
There is no grand master plan behind Just Me. It is a side project. A digital notebook. A small laboratory. A place to experiment and to collect the things I find interesting. Some of those things are closely related to my professional work. Others have absolutely nothing to do with it. That is precisely the point.
I like technology, but I am interested in more than technology itself. I am interested in what people do with it. Why we build certain things. Why some ideas succeed while others disappear. Why we collectively choose one technology when perfectly good alternatives exist. And what happens when somebody ignores the obvious route and tries something completely different.
There will always be another tool to discover, another idea to investigate, another website to stumble across and another question I had never thought of asking. So I keep looking around. And every now and then, I write about what I find. That’s Just Me.