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EU Data Act: The Beginning of the End for Cloud Monoculture?

What has the EU ever done for us? …well, aside from free movement, no roaming charges, consumer protection, the single market, Erasmus, and more. But also: excessive bureaucracy, slow decisions, overregulation down to the much-mocked bottle cap – a favorite symbol for anyone blaming Europe for every innovation shortfall.

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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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Think Locally: On-Premise LLMs as Drivers of Competitive Advantage
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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

We talk a big game about values and privacy, yet depend on AI that either denies historical atrocities or could cut us off tomorrow. Is this what Europe gets for dropping the ball on high tech infrastructure?

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

Choosing the right patterns is critical, as it directly impacts the system’s security posture, performance, scalability, and maintainability.

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Updating OWASP’s Microservice Security Cheat Sheet: Authorization Patterns
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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

Tired of AI hype? Me too. But beneath the buzzwords lies real value for developers. Tools like Claude Code save me hours on routine tasks, freeing me to focus on what matters: understanding problems and building the right solutions. It’s not magic—it’s practical support that makes development faster without replacing our core skills.

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Updating OWASP’s Microservice Security Cheat Sheet: Authentication Patterns
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What’s Wrong with the Current OWASP Microservice Security Cheat Sheet?

Modern microservice architectures require evolving security practices. Yet popular resources like the OWASP Microservice Security Cheat Sheet are starting to show their age and need a fresh look.

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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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First Agile, Then Agentic

Why AI Won’t Help You

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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

This article explores the many hidden forms of technical debt that silently slow down IT teams—far beyond just messy code.

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Enabling Stakeholders as a Success Factor
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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

Internal Developer Platforms (IDPs) help us accelerate software development. They represent the natural evolution of developments over the past decades. We’d like to show why this is the case with a historical overview and then examine current challenges.

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Common Approaches in the Field of Socio-Technical Architectures
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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

Informal structures are hard to spot – but they can make or break a technical solution. Sociotechnical systems show why that matters, and what mining has to do with building apps.

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Infrastructure in architectural documentation
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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.