About me

Hi, I'm Joost.

I started messing with software when I was 13 and never really stopped. Image recognition on embedded devices, self learning systems, mobile apps, the lot. More than 30 years of building things, and the last stretch of that has been cloud. Over ten years AWS, mostly serverless. Three years Azure. So I've seen both models from the inside, not from a slide deck.

I have opinions about this work and I don't keep them quiet.

Virtual machines in the cloud are almost always the wrong choice.

Most teams use cloud the way they used their own servers. They lift the VMs over, put a load balancer in front, and pay more for the same architecture they had on-prem. That's not cloud, that's a rented data center. Done right, cloud is event-driven, composable, and serverless, with a cost floor near zero and security that's actually fine grained instead of one credential per machine.

That's also where AWS and Azure split for me. The two clouds think in opposite directions. One is built for the engineer who automates everything, the other for the enterprise migrating its old world over and keeping someone in control of it. The tooling follows the strategy, and once you see it you can't unsee it. I write about that gap on the blog, with real numbers and code, not vibes.

And I don't just talk about it, I built it. A fully serverless, self-hosted email server. It deploys on your own AWS account in minutes, runs for about a dollar a month, and is driven entirely by API. Bring-your-own-cloud, no managed SaaS in the middle. Serverless and composable beating managed infrastructure and VMs, as a thing you can run yourself.

Outside of work you'll find me trying out new concepts, spending time with my family, and exercising as much as I can.

Let's connect the clouds.