Why does a 46-year-old consultant start a blog?

By Job van der Wagt10 September 2026Business and Technology

In the 2000s everyone started a blog. They were mostly people in their twenties. In the 2010s those people started YouTube channels. Nowadays nobody starts a blog anymore, except if you are a retired journalist (Matthijs van Nieuwkerk) or a tech mogul and want to warn about the dangers of AI. I am neither - so why am I starting one?

I had heard that it was now possible for non-technical people to build software easily with AI. This blog is my first experiment in testing whether that is correct. I asked Claude to help me build a website with the most modern technologies, similar to how a professional web developer would build it. It came up with a design based on React and Next.js, apparently the bleeding edge. The first 60% I mostly coded myself with strong guidance from Claude, but then I got tired and Claude finished on its own. It was surprisingly simple and I am convinced I could build much more complicated things this way. This is a revolution.

My first job was as a technology journalist for the career weekly 'Intermediair' and later I wrote as a columnist for the magazine for a while. So I believe I can write. Inspired by nice blogs of tech people like Paul Graham, Sam Altman and Patrick Collison I now feel inspired to keep this experiment going.

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