I am Joost Faassen. I build software, I have done so since the early 2000s, and for most of that time I have run the companies that build it.
Now
My focus is AI for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Not the demo, the Tuesday morning: the quote that writes itself from an email, the inbox that sorts itself, the report that is ready before the meeting, the agent that does the first pass so you do the last.
I pick tools that a small team can run without a department behind them. I set them up, I use them in my own companies first, and I write down what held up.
This blog
The notes here are that log. Short, practical, and specific: what I tried, what it cost, what broke, and what I would do again. If a note does not give you something you can apply this week, in your business or at home, it does not belong here.
Start here if you have tried an assistant and not much more. Go further if you already let an agent change your work.
Work
I am a co-founder of LinkORB, the engineering company behind a family of healthcare products in the Netherlands. For years I have been a co-owner of Onatal and Orfeus, two of the larger players in Dutch perinatal care software, and of Zwangerenportaal, the patient-facing side of that world. Obstetric practices, hospitals and parents use that software every day, which has taught me more about reliability, privacy and plain usefulness than any framework ever did.
Across those years the work has been the same in different shapes: architecture, the technical direction of products, the conversations with the people who depend on them, and the engineering teams that keep them running.
Earlier
I started where a lot of us did, too deep. My first public project was V2_OS, an operating system written entirely in 32-bit assembly, around the turn of the century. Later came years of PHP and open source: client libraries, developer tools and infrastructure pieces, most of them under the LinkORB name on GitHub.
That history is why I trust AI with real work and still read every line it writes. I know what the machine is doing underneath, and I know how often the plausible answer is the wrong one.
Elsewhere
The code is on GitHub. The working history is on LinkedIn. I live in the Netherlands.