What is the Labs?

The Labs

I’ve always had the feeling that I’m learning a lot — but rarely finishing things.

New technologies, new ideas, new tools. Starting is easy. Sticking with something long enough to really understand it is the hard part.

Max Wüst Labs is my attempt to change that.

It’s a place where I explore, build and share what I learn along the way. Not as a finished expert, but as someone who is genuinely trying to understand how things work.

Labs are for experiments

I’ve always liked the idea of sharing what I learn publicly. But more importantly, I needed a system that keeps me accountable.

Because life gets busy. Family, work and hobbies fill up the days faster than you expect. And without structure, ideas tend to stay just ideas.

The Labs are my way of creating that structure.

It’s a framework that pushes me to follow through on the things I start — because I want to publish them here.

At the same time, it gives me the freedom to explore. To try things without the pressure of having everything figured out.

The system

Over time, I realized that most of what I do falls into three categories:

Knowledge

This is where I share things I feel reasonably confident about.

It includes blog posts, videos, Shorts or even full courses — depending on the depth and scope of the topic.

With around a decade of experience in professional software development, I still consider myself an advanced beginner most of the time. There’s always more to learn, and explaining things to others is one of the best ways to deepen that understanding.

The Knowledge category is about exactly that: learning something well enough to explain it.

Experiments

This is where things get uncomfortable.

In my day-to-day work, I constantly learn new things — but rarely in a way that allows me to fully explore them. There’s usually not enough time, and honestly, clients don’t pay me to experiment.

That’s what this space is for.

Trying out new frameworks, languages or ideas. Building small things. Figuring out what works — and what doesn’t.

And yes, that also means failure.

There will be projects I abandon. Ideas that don’t make sense anymore. Things I simply lose interest in.

But that’s part of the process.

Because the first step is always the same: to try something.

Products

And then there are the things that go beyond experiments.

There are a few ideas I want to build and share in public — not just as technical exercises, but as actual products.

Because building a “Hello World” or a todo app is one thing. Turning an idea into something real, something usable, is something completely different.

As a fullstack developer, I see this as an opportunity to improve a wide range of skills — not in theory, but by actually building and shipping something.

And ideally, not alone.

This is also an invitation: to share feedback, ideas and perspectives along the way.

A word about AI

I’m a big fan of AI and the potential it has.

In fact, I wrote my bachelor’s thesis in 2018 about neural networks and dynamic dialogue generation — back when chatbots were just starting to become a bigger topic.

At the same time, I’m a bit concerned about how AI is currently being used in everyday life.

Not because it’s bad — but because it can easily replace understanding.

If we stop thinking about what we’re doing, debugging becomes harder. Maintaining systems becomes harder. Building things from scratch becomes harder.

And I think that’s especially true in software development.

Part of the idea behind the Labs is to create a counterbalance to that. To focus on understanding systems, technologies and frameworks — not just using them.

That being said: I also love the creative side of AI.

The 3D visuals you see on this page are generated with ChatGPT. And honestly, without tools like that I probably wouldn’t even attempt something like this.

About me

I’m Max — a software engineer, father, founder, former airline pilot, gamer and sci-fi fan (especially the Alien franchise).

But more than anything else, I’m curious.

Curious about how systems work. Curious about patterns, frameworks and ideas. Curious enough to keep learning.

Thank you!

Thanks for reading this far.

This is my first blog post, and writing it made one thing very clear: writing is a skill in itself. Something I’ll have to learn and improve over time — just like everything else.

If you’re interested in what I’m building here, consider subscribing to the newsletter.

It helps me understand if this resonates with anyone — and it keeps you updated on new posts, experiments and projects.