I’m two people at the keyboard, and they don’t get along.
One wants absolute control – to understand every layer down to the code and build it himself, so nothing is hidden and nothing can be taken away. He takes a problem apart to the last detail and can’t leave it alone, chasing a version that’s finally right – which, of course, it never quite is.
The other is impatient and a little lazy, and wants the result now. He’ll happily use what someone else built to see the thing work today instead of next month, and is honest enough to admit he often isn’t sure he has the skill or the time to build it all himself anyway.
So I live on a spectrum between them, and decide almost everything somewhere along it. Build it myself and it’s mine, complete, controlled – and slower, narrower, dependent on my finding the hours. Use what exists and I’m faster and richer in features – and one price hike, one discontinued product, one closed company away from having it pulled out from under me. That dilemma never fully resolves.
And I don’t think it’s just mine. Scale it up and it’s the same two forces in suits: the side that wants to own and control, and the side that wants it fast, cheap and full-featured. Every sovereignty decision is really an argument between those two. I just run both sides myself, at a keyboard.
What actually drives it
Not fear – irritation. The specific annoyance of having built something that did exactly what I wanted, then watching someone else break it for reasons that had nothing to do with me. A feature quietly removed. A price suddenly tripled. A service in the foundations simply shutting down. Each time, a perfectly good solution had to be torn up and rebuilt around a hole I didn’t make. You only need that a few times before you start asking, of anything you depend on: what happens to me if this goes away?
The one platform I trust – with a small asterisk
Which makes LinkedIn an odd thing for me to lean on, because I do trust it. I’ve used it since 2006 – one of the services I’ve relied on longest – and despite the recent drift, the AI slop, the strange uses, I’m genuinely a fan. It gives me things I could never build myself: reach, an audience already gathered, discovery, the numbers that tell me what landed. It has never let me down.
So there it is: the one dependency I’ve made my peace with, even though everything in me says hedge it. I rely most on the platform my own instincts would tell me to be wary of – and I’m honest enough to find that funny. Where I do hedge, and how, is its own small story.
Easy on top, considered underneath
If there’s one way I build, it’s this: easy in the foreground, complex in the background. The hard work goes underneath, so the surface can stay simple.
That isn’t just taste. It’s the thing most sovereignty efforts get wrong. Control that’s painful to use doesn’t get used – it gets quietly worked around until it may as well not be there. The usable-but-slightly-less-pure version beats the perfect-but-unbearable one almost every time, because only the usable one survives contact with real work. Sovereignty nobody will operate isn’t sovereignty. It’s an architecture diagram.
This site is built the same way: plain and quiet to read, deliberately owned underneath. Everything else here is about helping organizations hold what they can’t afford to lose and let go of the rest. This is me doing the same with my own work, in public, at small scale. If you wanted to know how I think, you’ve just watched it. The site you’re on is the argument.
The writing starts on the home page. And if you’d rather follow along where the conversation happens – that’s on LinkedIn.
Matthias Guenther. Based in the Netherlands. Dutch, English, German.
More than two decades in digital infrastructure and software. Book author, university lecturer and public speaker.
Employed at Equinix; views here are my own and independent of my employer. Personal site.
AI in the loop for drafting and editing articles. The thinking, the arguments, the mistakes – mine.
Reach me at m@tthias.nl or on LinkedIn