Souvereignty: When the lights go out!
No matter how meticulously you set up your infrastructure, a power grid failure will take your servers down, unless you have a UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) to keep things running. A UPS takes over the power supply, until its battery runs out. But here’s the catch: even the best UPS is pointless if your services don’t restart automatically when power returns. I recently put this to the test while installing a car charger at home. Continue reading
Souvereignty: Core infrastructure
We’ve forgotten how to build things ourselves. The public cloud is like a dealer: you pay for what you need, when you need it. It’s very convenient, but you’re trapped. Trapped in their ecosystem, their rules, their pricing, their price bumps. Escaping that trap requires some serious planning. It’s about answering the hard questions: What hardware do you use? What do you repurpose, what do you buy? Which stack do you trust? Continue reading
Souvereignty: the first steps
The 1984 Apple commercial is legendary! A young girl throws a hammer into a screen, breaking the control of corporate power. When I started writing this blog about sovereignty, that image popped into my head. Sovereignty, or digital sovereignty, is a term we hear a lot these days. What does it actually mean? And why is everyone talking about it? At first, I thought it was just about making sure personal data doesn’t fall under the US Cloud Act, which allows the US government to access it. Continue reading
Revamping my blog in a changing world
The world we live in is changing at a rapid pace. Not only technologically, but also geopolitically. As a kid, I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s — a time when tensions between the West and the East were high, with both sides threatening to obliterate each other using nuclear missiles. After the fall of the Iron Curtain, East and West found more common ground, and the fear of mutual destruction began to fade. Continue reading
The Art of Conversation
In the 1990’s when I did my bachelor in computer science, teachers told us that we would be replaced by 4GL languages. Languages in which end-users would describe how applications should work. At that time we laughed at them, saying we saw the exact opposite. Oh dear, we were right. Code became complexer, new concepts arrived on the horizon and software development matured. Fast forward to the 2020’s… Over the last year, I’ve been giving a lot of GitHub Copilot training sessions world wide. Continue reading