Almost everything I write, I publish on LinkedIn. That’s where the people I want to reach are. So why this plainer, quieter place too, with no feed, no audience to speak of? The answer is the thing I write about – and the way I’m built.

A short version of where it comes from. I’ve always loved to build. First Lego, then computers, then code. Then I discovered I could go faster by using what others had built – DLLs, then services. Until one day a provider switched off a feature my solution relied on, and the whole thing had to be rebuilt around the gap. Since then I’ve believed in backups, fallbacks and redundancy – what I’d now call sovereignty.

Two people, one keyboard

The truth is I’m two people at the keyboard, and they don’t get along.

One wants absolute control – to understand every layer 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 annoys me

Not fear. The specific irritation of having built something that did exactly what I wanted, and 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 most continuously – 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.

But I’ve watched people I admire get suspended or cut off. Not often, not likely to be me. But not impossible – and “not impossible” is enough when what’s at stake is the whole record of what I’ve written.

So I own the part I can’t stand to lose

I can’t build everything myself; I’ve admitted that. But I can own this – not the words, exactly. Words are cheap, and half their job is to travel. What I want to hold is what sits under them: the ideas, the principles, the analogies and the occasional joke thrown in to make a complicated thing a little more approachable. That’s the part that’s mine, and that I’d rather not have hanging on someone else’s business – the kind of dependency that probably never bites, but could. Like fresh snow in Amsterdam on Christmas Eve, with full moon, in a leap year. Unlikely. Not impossible. And “not impossible” is enough when it’s the only copy.

So this site holds it. Plain files, my name, a server I control, nothing that couldn’t be moved elsewhere in an afternoon. LinkedIn is where the thinking is seen. This is where it’s kept. That’s not control over everything – I gave up on that years ago. It’s control over the few things whose loss I couldn’t absorb, and calm dependence on the rest.

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 every time, because only the usable one survives contact with real work. Sovereignty nobody will operate isn’t sovereignty. It’s a diagram.

This site is built the same way: plain and quiet to read, deliberately owned underneath. Which is why the page exists at all. 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.
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 https://www.linkedin.com/in/mguenther/