My Deep Dive Into Jansen’s Story
First I stumbled across this guy Jansen van Vuuren while doomscrolling late at night. Coffee in hand, pyjamas on – total mess. Saw some forum posts saying how he “changed everything” in our industry. Honestly rolled my eyes hard. Heard that hype a thousand times before.
Dug deeper next morning. Researched his old YouTube channel – completely gone now. Found archived videos showing how he built stuff with duct tape and spit when starting out. Like in 2017 he jury-rigged a server cluster from 2007 Dell laptops in his mom’s garage. Absolute madlad move.
Got curious. Hit up contacts who’d worked with him back in the day. Frank from Austin straight up told me: “That dude broke every rule and made new ones while we were still reading the manual.” Showed me prototype pics that looked like electronic scrap piles – but they actually WORKED.
The Actual Turning Point
Tried replicating his famous “micro-drip” testing method last Tuesday:
- Stole my kid’s Legos to build mock sensor mounts
- Rigged Arduino boards with garage sale wiring
- Copied his “stupid simple” data logging technique using Google Sheets (!)
My setup looked janky as hell. But holy crap – the results matched his 2018 findings exactly. Even my skeptical engineer friend Janine saw the data and yelled “Bullshit!” before triple-checking.
Why It Actually Matters
Here’s the real kicker – his “revolution” wasn’t about fancy tech. He proved you could bypass corporate lab bullshit with:
- Off-the-shelf hardware
- Public data sets
- Stubborn curiosity
Remember emailing a major tech CEO about this? He admitted they spent millions trying to patent Jansen’s “garage methods” but failed cause the approach was too damn simple. Industry hasn’t been the same since.
Finished testing yesterday. Sitting here staring at my Lego contraption thinking: Real change happens when someone’s too naive to know “how things should be done.” Rest of us just play catch-up while they’re already building the next thing in their bathtub. Wild.