I'm Joep and currently living in Lieshout in The Netherlands, a small town near Eindhoven en Helmond. I went to Eindhoven to study mechanical engineering at TU/e university. After working as a mechanical engineer for 7.5 years, I quit my "dayjob" and started working full time on my own company: jodiBooks.
Joeplaa, pronounce "you-p-laah", is an abbreviation of my full name: Joep van de Laarschot. Initially I started using it to shorten my e-mail address, but it turned into my "official" handle @joeplaa everywhere on the web.
Back in 2018 I started writing a few articles on Medium. I liked it, and although I didn't fully understand why, I wanted my own website. So I started this blog as a hosted WordPress blog in 2019. I didn't really have a subject to write about. Hell, I didn't even know what I should be doing with my life. I was kind of stuck, but I knew I had to start figuring out what to do. So I started writing about what I then formulated as my life goals.
After about a year I was stuck again. A lot had happened and I didn't feel like writing. I tried to post something, but it just wasn't going anywhere. My goals just didn't feel right anymore. They represented a different me and I had no idea what they should be.
I doubled down on my coding and created a new blog and homepage. I thought that would be cool to do, but alas...no. Coding and building something is cool, but coding alone doesn't make me happy.
So in the summer of 2021 I decided to buy a server and start experimenting with web3. Not the coding, but the hosting part. Having my own server also meant I could use it to professionalize our internal jodiBooks infrastructure. And behold, I liked doing that!
It's 2022 now and I have ditched the web3 stuff. Crypto-applications sounds cool, but they are still very immature and just too much work to keep running. I have two servers in my homelab running a router/firewall, a NAS and multiple virtual machines. They run our jodiBooks development and business services, but I also use them to experiment. It is called a "lab" after all.
So what about this blog? What to do with it? Running it as the React website I created was cool from a coding perspective, but too much work if you just want to write sometimes. So I rebuild it again. This time with Ghost.
Reading back all my old stories was pretty awkward. I've changed so much and my ideas have changed too. But I decided too keep them anyway. I had to go through that phase of being really cool and confident about stuff I knew nothing about. It's part of the transition to a new worldview I guess.
I'm not going to promise anything. I might write something, I might not. The subject might also be anything. I might have done something cool with my homelab or read/heard something interesting about life. Who knows...
Website hosting
Originally I used joeplaa.com as my personal blog, but with the start of "Joeplaa the business", I moved the blog to blog.joeplaa.com. That business however is not really active and the main page, joeplaa.com, is now used to collect my thoughts and interests.
