What is software sovereignty

Software sovereignty is a subset of digital sovereignty. In essence, digital sovereignty means controlling your data, hardware and software. In Europe digital sovereignty has been driven by the EU. The reason is the reliance on services from big, global US-led vendors such as Amazon, Microsoft and Google. This poses a risk to the EU, just as does reliance on Chinese manufacturing is similarly a risk.

These worries are compounded by the threats to democracy posed by rise of authoritarianism (e.g Russia and China) and other threats to democracy, such as Trump’s rise to power and the MAGA movement in the US, and the rise of far-right nationalistic parties in various European countries. Without digital sovereignty in general, or software sovereignty in particular, somebody could “pull the plug” and you would loose access to your own data, hardware and software. Moreover, if you do not control your data, hardware and software, you’re capability to innovate is severely hindered.

We participated in Red Hat Open Tour 2022 Tallinn a few weeks ago. Jaan Tanel Veikesaar from Elering, a gas/energy company in Estonia, gave a really nice presentation about their Ansible automation project. Ansible is a very common infrastructure as code and automation tool. Below I’ll go over Jaan’s presentation, adding some comments and key takeaways.

The starting point for the Ansible automation project

The starting point at Elering was fairly typical: to create a new VM, one had to go to VSphere, launch a VM and continue from there manually. In other words, automation did not really exist. This started to change when business started to demand more from the IT without adding any more human resources. This essentially made automation a necessity instead of being a luxury. So, they did some research and testing, after which Elering ended up with Ansible. They made this choice in part because whenever an Ansible problem was encountered, they could find an answer easily from the Internet.

The slippery slope

Custom software development services are in high demand today. Organizations are willing to pay considerable amounts of money for development of custom software, be it mobile applications relying on backend services in the Cloud, or tailoring of open source software to better fit their needs. This has provided the impetus for rapid growth of companies that provide software development services. Some of these companies simply rent developers to clients, others work on customer projects handling both project management and development.

As an entrepreneur you are flooded with attempts to persuade you to buy something. Typically what is sold is services like website development, mobile application development or outsourced developer/devops workforce. Most attempts are mediocre, but only a few can be classified as outright bad. As inbound marketing and sales are dear to our heart, in this series we present some of the worst marketing attempts we’ve seen, in the order of appearance. We try to add some value by adding a humoristic analysis on top. All the names and emails have been converted to John or Jane Doe and example.org so that you don’t accidentally buy anything from these guys. However, with pinch of luck you may find the exact same message in your INBOX if you feel the urge to buy something from these guys.

Introduction

Integrating Keycloak with Gitlab SAML makes it easier to manage users in an organization from a central point. You could manage separate accounts on Gitlab, but for us it makes sense to utilize Keycloak as we are already using it for other applications.

Setting up Keycloak

The first step is to create a Gitlab SAML client in the Keycloak dashboard. With the correct realm selected, navigate to the Clients configuration page and click the create button to add a new client.

Throw a job ad on a recruitment portal, wait for applications, hold a couple of interviews and that’s it, right? This is what recruiting can look like from the outside but there’s quite a bit more to it. A recruitment campaign can be a massive effort especially for small businesses. In addition, if you’re doing it for the first time, you may want some advice.

We’re a small company (with 3 more or less part-time employees) who recently ran our first official recruitment campaign so we know what we’re talking about! We hope that sharing our experiences will help other small businesses and organizations to get the most out of a recruitment campaign without losing too much time and money and building a good employer brand at the same time.

Today was a special day. Our Finnish website went to greener pastures after having spent its golden months serving permanent HTTP redirects to our current website while having been taken our of our Terraform codebase. It is customary to speak a few words in occasions like this, so here we go.

“Beloved www.puppeteers.fi. You were a well-liked website that brought us our first customer. Occasionally you were down because MySQL innodb_buffer_pool_size was set too low. Or because overall system memory went too low and the OOM killer broke you. But we cannot blame you for that - it was just us trying to spare some €€€ that caused all that. You served us well, but it was time to finally move on.”

Introduction

The purpose of this post is to show that search engine marketing (SEM) can be started rather easily. Small businesses, like our company, may not have resources (money, knowledge, time etc) to spend on marketing and consultancy so I’m hoping that sharing this experience will help and encourage other SEM newbies!

This blog post is in no means a complete SEM tutorial. There are plenty online, paid and free (I’ll list some in the next chapter). My idea instead is to focus on the main points for getting started with SEM and also to enlighten some of they key concepts and terms. I’m trying to write down things that I hope I had heard of before starting with SEM!

The keys on your laptop are the kind of item you don’t pay any attention until you lose them. The “O” key came off from my Carbon X1 keyboard a few days ago. I was able to postpone the ultimate solution by a couple of days by just pushing the “O” back. But doing that five times a day got old soon. So, I took of another key - “I” - to figure out the correct alignment for the metal hooks that hold the plastic hinges in place. That was a good idea on paper except that I was able to break the hinge when installing the “I” back. After a failed attempt of gluing the hinge together with a generous amount of epoxy I gave up and decided to order replacement keys.