I'm an enterprise architect at a Dutch pension provider. After hours I build the kind of projects that are bigger than they need to be — an IDE, a knowledge tool, an archive — because reasoning under uncertainty is the kind of thing you only get good at one mistake at a time.
Architecture decisions are rarely about "the right choice". They're about trade-offs that are good enough for today and flexible enough for tomorrow. Pragmatic where possible, careful where it matters. High-risk decisions are rare — and that's a good thing.
But you don't learn that kind of thinking by reading about it. You learn it by deciding, making mistakes, and updating your mental model. That requires a safe environment: a place where it matters that you build something, but not what you build.
My side projects are that place. A playground for concepts, architectures, and technologies where the stakes are low and the learning curve steep.
So I keep building. Short-cycle but not short-sighted, small implementations of bigger ideas. Most of it is half-finished, some of it surprises me, and a few have stuck around long enough to share.
A few of those below.