Introducing the Sovereignty Scale: A Path to EU Digital Independence

In today’s digital landscape, the concept of sovereignty has become increasingly important, especially within the European Union (EU). As geopolitical circumstances evolve, there is a growing demand for sovereign cloud and tech solutions that can rival the dominance of Big Tech companies like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. However, the path to achieving true digital independence is complex and multifaceted. This is where the Sovereignty Scale comes in—a novel concept designed to measure and promote progress towards EU digital sovereignty.

Prompt Engineering as Code: AI Memory Transfer and Reusable Instructions

Introduction

In the rapidly evolving field of artificial intelligence, efficiency and consistency are paramount. Borrowing from the successes of methodologies like Infrastructure as Code (IaC) and Documentation as Code (Docs as Code), we can enhance AI interactions by treating prompts and context as code artifacts. This approach introduces two innovative concepts under one banner:

1. Prompt Seed: Capturing and transferring AI interaction contexts in code format.
2. Prompt Instruction: Storing and managing prompt templates as reusable code components.

By unifying these under the umbrella of Prompt Engineering as Code (PEaC), we can apply best practices from software development to AI prompt management, enabling version control, collaboration, and scalability.

Generation GovTech

Introduction

This post introduces a new term, Generation GovTech, or GenGT for short.

You’ll find a full description of this term below. To explain it fully, we’ll first cover the recruitment campaign by the Dutch Ministry of Defense: Generation D

Generation D

In 2022, the MoD launched the recruitment campaign Generation D. The campaign aimed to attract people with a specific mindset. This mindset includes individuals who want to do meaningful work, believe in cooperation, and seek personal growth.

Co source

Intro

Protected Inner Source Recap

Protected Inner Source is a source code sharing strategy that defines an intermediate model between Open Source and Inner Source. The analogy used here is that C# Access Modifiers define a ‘Protected Internal Class’ as an intermediate between ‘Public Class’ and ‘Internal Class’. The purpose of which is to be more closed off between assemblies than ‘Public Class’, yet more open for reuse than ‘Internal Class’.

Protected Inner Source

UPDATE: Based on feedback, I am changing the name of this source code sharing strategy to ‘Co Source’. The direct analogy between Protected Internal Class and Protected Inner Source seemed to imply a lack of security in traditional Open Source sharing strategies, which was not my intent. Read more about the naming change in my follow-up article here: Co Source - Renamed Source Code Sharing Strategy

Intro

Inner source

In the digital era, software development is a cornerstone of innovation. Inner Source has gained traction in this domain. It is a strategy that applies Open Source practices within an organization. Unlike Open Source, Inner Source is not public. It remains confined to a single organization. This approach encourages collaborative software development. Teams across the organization can contribute, regardless of departmental boundaries. Inner Source fosters a culture of transparency and shared responsibility. It leads to improved code quality and accelerated innovation. By leveraging Inner Source, companies can harness the collective expertise of their employees. They can do so while protecting proprietary code.

Firewall port testing

Intro

Recently I had some issues at a customer project where, due to the complexity of the environment, sometimes firewall ports were closed after they had initially been added to the rules list. This caused unexpected errors for SharePoint, of which we were unaware at the time that these were due to firewall issues.

While analyzing the issue I came across the Test-NetConnection PowerShell command, which I used to manually verify the issue on one server. However when the time came to repeat the command on several servers I started automating things with my own script. Soon enough the project manager asked me if I could output the results of my script to Excel and send him the files by mail.