About Jan

🇳🇱 Nederlands · Esperanto
Photo of Jan

Hi, I'm Jan van Veldhuizen.

From punch cards to AI: that's roughly my career. I studied mathematics in Leiden in the 1970s and got hooked on computers. I spent so much time on them that I never finished the degree.

I found a job as a programmer, and my hobby became my work. Over the last thirty-odd years, I worked as a developer and software architect at Onguard. Since April 2025, I've been retired.

At home, I've automated a fair bit, from lights to blinds. I have a decent machine running pretty much everything, a "homelab", as they call it in hobbyist circles. I experiment a lot and keep learning new programming languages. I follow AI developments closely and occasionally give talks about it.

Away from tech, I play the organ in church services and I'm fond of foreign languages. Not so much the literature or culture, but the grammar. I can browse through dictionaries and grammar books for hours. Somewhat mathematical in that regard.

My wife and I enjoy long walks and bike rides. In 2022 we cycled from home to Santiago de Compostela.

This site is a hobby project too, and it runs on my homelab, naturally. I write about tech stuff here, about language, and the occasional musing. A mix of English and Dutch, and sometimes even Esperanto.

Thanks for visiting, feel free to say hello.