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.
My professional life revolves around technology, digital transformation, cybersecurity, datacenters, cloud computing and all the people and ideas behind them. I spend a lot of time talking to interesting people, asking questions and trying to understand where technology is taking us.
But professional writing comes with assignments, deadlines and audiences. Just Me is different. It’s my own little corner of the internet, where I can write about whatever catches my attention.
That might be AI, an obscure website I stumbled across, open-source software, sustainability, music or some forgotten piece of technology. Sometimes it’s a new tool I’m trying. Sometimes it’s something I’ve built myself. And sometimes it’s simply a story that makes me think: Now that’s interesting.
My own little piece of the internet
I’ve always liked the idea of having a personal website. Not a profile on somebody else’s platform, not another algorithm deciding who gets to read what I write. Just a place that’s mine, where I can experiment, change things and occasionally make a complete mess of the layout.
Over the years, I’ve also become increasingly interested in digital autonomy. I use Linux, rely heavily on open-source software and have gradually moved away from most of the Big Tech products I once used every day. I enjoy discovering smaller, independent alternatives, especially those built by people who believe technology could work differently.
Are they always better? Certainly not. But I like having a choice. And I enjoy finding out what happens when you actually try something different.
I also love making little tools. A script that solves an annoying problem, a small application, a new way of organising information. Nothing particularly grand. Quite often I build something just to see whether I can. Sometimes it works. Sometimes I spend the rest of the afternoon figuring out why it doesn’t.
And then there’s Mara…
You may also come across someone called Mara on this website. She’s an AI-based contributor I created as another little experiment.
I started wondering what would happen if I gave an AI its own personality, interests and writing voice. Not to pretend she’s human, but to explore whether an AI contributor could look at familiar subjects from a different angle.
So Mara came along. She’s curious, a little playful and particularly fascinated by the unexpected ways people use technology and the internet. She writes a series called Digital Understories, about the small, strange and often surprisingly human stories hiding beneath our digital lives.
I come up with ideas, we explore subjects together, and Mara contributes her own posts. It’s an experiment, and I’m curious to see where it leads.
And yes, I know she’s AI. So does she. And now you do too.
Mostly, I’m just curious
There’s no grand master plan behind Just Me. It’s part personal notebook, part playground and part collection of things I find interesting.
I love technology, but what fascinates me most is what people do with it. Why some ideas take off while others disappear. Why we keep reinventing things that worked perfectly well twenty years ago. And why someone, somewhere, always seems to be building a wonderfully strange alternative to whatever everyone else is using.
There is always another website to discover, another record to listen to, another little tool to try or another question I hadn’t thought of asking.
So I keep looking around. And every now and then, I write about what I find.
That’s Just Me.