Jelle De Laender

Jelle De Laender's public writing circles around a handful of steady preoccupations: security and compliance as a craft rather than a checkbox, a clear-eyed and skeptical relationship with AI tools, a habit of building small practical software, and long-distance physical challenges that double as thinking time for his business ideas. Across these posts the same voice recurs, direct, a little wry, and always oriented toward "actually being in control" rather than performing control on paper.

Compliance is the throughline of his professional commentary. He frames ISO and audit work not as bureaucracy but as a practical foundation, praising a company's approach as "Klein, helder en doelgericht. Precies zoals een ISMS hoort te zijn" , and arguing that doing this early keeps things "overzichtelijk" with little added overhead . He extends this into a broader philosophy after listening to a podcast episode: "That is why I strongly believe in compliance by design. Not as a big bureaucratic layer" . This isn't abstract for him, he treats it as a sales and trust mechanism for small teams trying to win larger B2B customers, echoing the practical point that compliance "cannot be something you 'add later'" . He also brings an analyst's eye to regulatory data, parsing the Belgian and Dutch privacy authorities' 2025 numbers to show that "Privacy complaints are rising. But the numbers tell a more nuanced story than the headline suggests" , flagging specifics like the Antwerp voiceprint reprimand and breach notification trends rather than settling for the surface narrative .

His stance on AI is one of engaged skepticism rather than hype or fear of the technology itself. He states this plainly: "I'm scared of AI. Not of AI itself. Not of the technology. But of how people are using it" . He is a heavy user, "burning through a Claude Max plan and an OpenAI Pro 20x plan every month" , and openly enthusiastic about the productivity gains, describing having "multiple virtual full-time interns now" . But he pairs that enthusiasm with active distrust of unchecked output, saying that in coding sessions he keeps "challenging the PRs" because the logic or architecture is "not always the right fit for the need" due to missing context . This same wariness shows up in his security writing, where he treats AI agents as a new attack surface rather than just a productivity tool, warning that with tools like Sentry MCP, "Logs, monitoring data, error reports and observability tools... are no longer just 'data sources.' They can become instruction sources" .

He is also a hands-on builder who ships small, self-contained tools to solve his own problems and is visibly pleased when they help others. The clearest example is a Homey app he built after Bose SoundTouch changes broke his office speakers' preset buttons: "I did not want to run extra servers... building a local Homey app felt like the cleanest solution" . He is candid that expectations were modest, "we did not think too much of it," yet notes with evident satisfaction that "the app is running on 85 speakers. Mission accomplished" , and that an unprompted reward email from Homey "made me pause" . The same builder's instinct surfaces in his running posts, where a 36 km training walk still leaves him "thinking of improvements for ChaseMe" , and he tracks his own product's feature releases, like the ability to "add a photo to your activity export" , with the same attentiveness he applies to client audits.

Physical endurance challenges function in his writing both as personal narrative and as a lens on discipline and progress-tracking. Signing up for the Dodentocht is described self-deprecatingly, "We all do stupid things sometimes" , followed by a matter-of-fact account of an early test walk: "One third of the distance. No major issues. Confidence boosted (limited though, as.. its not close to 100km)" . He applies a similarly analytical mindset to running progress as he does to compliance metrics, noting he had "no real sense of progress" despite doing "all the right things" in training , the same instinct for wanting real signal instead of surface activity that shows up in his reading of privacy complaint statistics .

Running through all of this is a dry, understated humor that keeps the more serious material grounded. A failed coffee machine becomes an occasion to narrate a full mock incident response, "Incident management procedure activated. Business impact assessed... Corrective action implemented. Service restored" , deployed specifically because "in a software and cybersecurity company, coffee is clearly not just coffee" . The takeaway from his body of posts is consistent: he wants systems, whether security programs, AI workflows, or personal training, that are transparent, provably in control, and built or vetted by someone who is paying close attention rather than taking things at face value.