You don’t need a jet engine to ride a bicycle. A decent VM or dedicated server from a European provider gets the job done—with less drama and fewer NDAs.
And the big players? The irony is thick. They’re spending millions a year on cloud bills when they could run their own internal PaaS with top-tier teams. But hey, who doesn't love burning cash in style?
Yes, Europe needs digital sovereignty. But let’s be honest: most European companies don’t need AWS, Azure, or any hyperscaler.
I fully support what STACKIT, OVH & others are doing—building real European alternatives. But even then, at least 80% of companies would be better off not using a hyperscaler at all. Too complex, too expensive, involving way too much vendor lock-in.
Sparring with AI in the beginning makes it much faster to get first results. And it's always easier to refine something that already exists than to start with nothing but a goal. But: AI assistants limit us and our ability to learn and innovate by keeping us within the boundaries we have already created.
So the next time you start something, think first. Then take a shower and think again before sharing your ideas with ChatGPT.
With the rise of AI, people will gradually forget how to really create something from scratch.
There will be generations of engineers and designers who do not know how to use their own imagination to start something. I can already see this when I work with young developers. AI intervention is just a click away. It’s so tempting. For all of us.
To the user, your front-end is your product.
As much as I love thinking about UX, I dislike implementing it. Iterating over my back-end code brings me joy. Do the same with UX? Not so much. It’s tedious. It’s all about the sum of minimal tweaks. Each of which requires a lot of effort to feel right on many devices.
And there’s often no obvious finish line. I wonder how da Vinci knew when the Mona Lisa was done.