Profile of Robert Hoekstra, the person behind awryLabs. A lawyer by training who builds machine-learning systems, a data and performance person in government, and a sociologist studying how communities hold together under disaster. awryLabs is the after-hours version of all of it: privacy-first games and tools. Links to GitHub at github.com/rhoekstr, LinkedIn at linkedin.com/in/rhoekstr, and email at coffee at awrylabs dot com.
Lawyer · data scientist · sociologist · maker
I find where systems fail people, then build small things to make them work better. A lawyer by training who builds machine-learning systems, a data and performance person in government by day, and a sociologist of how communities hold together, or do not, when a disaster suspends the usual rules. awryLabs is the after-hours version of all of it: games and tools that are a little off on purpose.
Strip out the degrees and the job titles and you do not get a smaller version of me — you get the actual engine. I treat understanding as the basic unit of a good life, and I have spent a couple of decades turning that into a habit that will not switch off.
The pattern is not that I am curious about a lot of things. Plenty of people are. It is that I go to the floor of whatever I pick up: I do not read across a field so much as read its serious critics until I have finished them, and I do not take up a hobby so much as get licensed in it. That produces an odd-looking résumé (economics, law, national security, computer science, sociology) that reads like indecision until you notice it is one move repeated: acquire exactly enough fluency in a discipline to force it into conversation with the others. I find it genuinely intolerable that fields which obviously bear on each other refuse to talk. So I keep building the bridges myself.
My actual research lives at one of those intersections: what happens to crime, and to a community, when a disaster temporarily suspends the rules that normally govern behavior, and why some places hold together while others fracture. It is a question you can only answer by being a sociologist, a data person, and a policy person at once, which is most of why I like it. And I aim the same lens inward. I treat myself as a system worth understanding and tuning, not out of anxiety and not as a productivity flex, but because clear thinking, paying real attention, and not being wrong in systematic ways are skills you can actually practice. I would rather read the literature, build the framework, and iterate than trust a vibe.
None of this would be sustainable if it were joyless, and it is not. There is a steady diet of Wodehouse as the necessary counterweight, a lot of late-1990s UK electronic music, an ongoing and slightly nerdy education in tea, board games, hiking in the western North Carolina mountains where I live, and a family I am raising on the principle that you should be allowed to read whatever you want, the more the better.
awryLabs is what happens when that whole apparatus gets pointed at making things. The work I value most makes a tangible difference for real people with a low risk of doing harm. Extractive systems offend me more aesthetically than morally; I would simply rather build the other kind. So the apps do not track you, do not nag you into a subscription, and try to be a little strange on purpose rather than by accident. Five current projects, across native apps, systems code, and the web, each with its own backstory.
For professional inquiries and work history, LinkedIn is the place. For code, GitHub. For anything else, email goes straight to my inbox, no form, no middleman.
✉ Email coffee@awrylabs.com