Sander Tuin
Developer · Leeuwarden, NL
I'm better at building things than writing about them. I make complicated things work, usually with Ruby on Rails. Currently at Booqable.
I used to over-engineer things. Luckily I stopped. Because six months later you're staring at your own code going "wtf is this", you run git blame, and surprise surprise - it was you all along. Now I keep code obvious. I'm also fine changing my mind mid-build. If something's not working, I'd rather reverse my own call than spend the rest of the project defending a bad one.
I tend to pick up the work nobody's excited about. The painful stuff. CI issues, flaky tests, migrating from one build system to another, rewriting to another language, moving package managers. Glamorous stuff. But I get it done quickly and move on to the more fun things.
9 years of Rails and I still freaking love it. Convention over configuration, predictability, consistency, no friction as long as you stay on the blessed path. Deviate and you're gonna have a bad time. Metaprogramming, foot guns everywhere. I've been on both sides. The cursed side is no bueno.
I barely write code by hand anymore. The agents do like 99% of the work. All I do is review and tell them they're wrong nine out of ten times. I went from copy-pasting into ChatGPT and hoping for the best, to Cursor's tab autocomplete, to now running my own agent setup on Pi. It's minimal, I can shape it however I want, and I spend way too much time doing exactly that. It's a rabbit hole. But it's just how I write software now.
What I've shipped
Production AI assistant. Built the whole AI assistant at Booqable from scratch. Never touched an LLM before that. Parent agent delegating to specialists, permission-aware tooling, streaming UI. It went to production and it works.
Payment domain rewrite. Two engineers couldn’t get this one across the line. I took it over solo. Stripe Connect, Terminal, webhooks, refunds. No regressions since, which honestly still surprises me.
Rails upgrades & CI overhaul. Rails version upgrades across major boundaries without breaking production. Also cut CI from 40 to 12 minutes and then slashed the infra bill by 80%. The kind of work nobody notices until it breaks.
You made it this far. Might as well say hi at hello@sander.garden.