Blog

Digital Sovereignty as Self-Understanding

How implementation teams can escape the we-are-not-Google trap and collectively take responsibility for European solutions to European problems.

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Software Analytics going crAIzy!

I’ve long been an advocate of treating software like data and analyzing it accordingly with tools like Python, pandas, Jupyter Notebook, Neo4j, and jQAssistant. In the era of AI and code transformation tools, seeing software as data gets more and more important when you want to improve your software system at a large scale. This blog post is a short interim report from me about my efforts taking software analysis to the next level.

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The Sovereignty Trap: Between Tiananmen and Trump

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Updating OWASP’s Microservice Security Cheat Sheet: Practical Considerations & Recommendations

Turning principles and patterns into practice — just as promised.

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From Data Graveyards to Knowledge Landscapes

Europe is sitting on a wealth of public data—but much of its potential remains untapped. The challenges are well known: fragmented portals, incompatible interfaces, and growing reliance on non-European platforms that slow innovation. While new industrial data spaces are emerging—enabling secure and sovereign exchange of sensitive information—public and industrial data ecosystems remain largely siloed. This article explores how Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the Model Context Protocol (MCP) can help bridge that gap and accelerate Europe’s shift from Open Data to Open Knowledge—supporting digital sovereignty and delivering greater value to society.

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Updating OWASP’s Microservice Security Cheat Sheet: Decision Dimensions for Authorization Patterns

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Updating OWASP’s Microservice Security Cheat Sheet: Authorization Patterns

Authorization patterns explain how distributed systems organize their access control — where and how decisions happen, where policies live — and influence, in turn, how identities and related attributes travel between components.

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Updating OWASP’s Microservice Security Cheat Sheet: Identity Propagation Patterns

Without trustworthy identity propagation, even strong initial authentication can be undermined — weakening trust boundaries and ultimately impairing the system’s ability to make reliable authorization decisions.

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AI — Behind the Buzzword Garbage

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Updating OWASP’s Microservice Security Cheat Sheet: Authentication Patterns

Without knowing who the subject is, without verifying its identity, there is only a limited way to perform meaningful access decisions.

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Updating OWASP’s Microservice Security Cheat Sheet: Core Concepts

In part two of my series, I begin the journey to rethink the OWASP Microservice Security Cheat Sheet. This post focuses on core concepts, laying the groundwork for practical, real-world microservice security.

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What’s Wrong with the Current OWASP Microservice Security Cheat Sheet?

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First Agile, Then Agentic

Agentic AI is supposed to accelerate software development. But new technologies can only reach their full potential when organizations adapt their structure, processes, and culture. Most organizations today are not yet able to truly benefit from faster software development. The prerequisite for this are the capabilities shaped by the agile and DevOps movements.

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Context Engineering

Have you ever wondered how chatbots, copilots, or virtual assistants seem to know just the right things to say — or sometimes, spectacularly fail? The difference often comes down to one crucial skill: context engineering.

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Technical and other Debt in IT Systems

A Broad Perspective

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Enabling Stakeholders as a Success Factor

Sociotechnical architectures consider both technical and human-organizational aspects and promote their effective collaboration. To ensure the successful design and implementation of these systems, it is crucial to actively involve stakeholders and address their interests. In this article, we explore why enabling stakeholders represents a key function in sociotechnical projects and how you can implement this approach effectively.

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Don’t Forget the People

On paper, the architecture vision is perfect. It addresses all pressing deficiencies of the existing system, aligns seamlessly with the business domain, and enables teams to retain more work within their boundaries. Finally, we will enjoy higher speed-to-market and a significant reduction in (non-value-adding, tedious) coordination efforts between teams. Surely, everyone will immediately see how much better our new architectural vision is. Not quite.

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Internal Development Platforms

Shift Down Instead of Shift Left

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Common Approaches in the Field of Socio-Technical Architectures

In the age of digitalization and modernization, companies face the challenge of not only keeping up with technological advancements but also optimizing their organizational structures. Socio-technical architectures play a crucial role in this process by focusing on the flow of work, team collaboration, and the seamless integration of technical and social systems. This article explores two key approaches—Team Topologies and Domain-Driven Design (DDD)—and demonstrates how they can help organizations take the first steps toward consciously designing their socio-technical architecture.

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How Much Thinking Can a Team Handle?

The term Cognitive Load has become a common reference point in recent discussions about team structures, roles, and task distribution in IT organizations. However, these discussions often fail to distinguish between the different purposes of IT organizations and frequently rely on an oversimplified concept of Cognitive Load.

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Socio-Technical Architectures: Informality from Mining to Today

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Infrastructure in architectural documentation

Most people are familiar with the principles of good architecture documentation. However, the infrastructure often goes unnoticed or is only understood by a few “experts”. Especially with complex systems, it is important to record solution concepts and decisions at the infrastructure level of an application in order to be able to understand the architecture and further develop the software. This article is aimed at development teams that have difficulties integrating infrastructure topics into their documentation. It also offers insights for platform engineers and cross-functional teams who are responsible for their own infrastructure.

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Socio-Technical Architecture as a Competitive Advantage

In today’s business world, technological progress is not just about increasing efficiency—it also unlocks entirely new business opportunities that would be unthinkable without these technologies. As a result, leveraging new technologies effectively has become a key competitive advantage. However, IT decision-makers are increasingly realizing that technology alone is not enough. Instead, companies must understand themselves as socio-technical systems, where technical systems and human interactions are deeply interconnected. This article explores why socio-technical architectures matter for IT decision-makers and how they can create a competitive edge for organizations.

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Spring Boot Actuator Endpoints

What does ‘production-ready’ actually mean?

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Always up to date

JDK 23 already contains the second preview for the new Class-File API, which will probably be completed in JDK 24. Now it’s time to take a look at what this API is all about and how we can use it.