Snel.com

A few days ago, I learned something about leadership from a pancake competition at my son's school. I was a parent volunteer and it was my first time baking pancakes, ever. We formed two teams. Boys against girls. I led the boys. The girls were led by a mother who is an excellent baker. Still we won! How? It obviously had nothing to do with talent or baking experience. She was kind to her team. Let them work at their own pace. Gave them room. The result was lumpy batter that made every pancake harder to get right. I on the other hand firmly told my team one thing before we started. Mix the batter well and I helped them to get it smooth. We got the batter smooth. And even though our first pancake was a disaster. Too thick, uneven heat, the second one worked and the third one was perfect. It worked out because the material was right. We just had to adjust the technique. That is the difference between a team with standards and a team with freedom but no baseline. We see this on a regular. A team lead who avoids giving direct feedback because they want to stay "approachable." A CTO who lets each engineer pick their own setup because it feels respectful. A founder who says "I trust my people" when what they really mean is "I do not want to have the hard conversation." Trust is not the absence of standards. Trust is built after the standards are clear. I am not a baker. I will probably never be. But I know this: the quality of what you build depends on the quality of what you start with. And that starts with someone being willing to say: this is what good looks like. Before anyone turns on the stove. What standards are ALWAYS enforced before your team starts? #leadership #saas #cloudinfrastructure

Last week we attended CloudFest 2026. I went to have real(istic) conversations about infrastructure, about where European cloud is heading, and to gain insight on sentiments and topics I might have missed. One thing that stood out to me is that the AI hype has cooled down. A lot. Last year, every booth and every pitch had AI in the headline. This year, the conversations were more grounded. People were talking about actual infrastructure problems again. Other hot topics were: data sovereignty, power supply challenges, and the rising costs of hardware resulting in more circulair thinking. That shift felt healthy to me. I've had the opportunity to pick the brain of: Thanh Le, Sharita Wolswijk, Isabell Perkins, Marko Luković, Ricardo Moreira, Stefano Onofri, Jack Bell, Steven Proudman, Denis Zelga, Markus Helmle, Zdravko Hristev, Diana Krieger, Oleksandr Iatsiuk, Elvira Kneefel and Kevin Phylipsen. Every one of them has given me something to think about. Thank you to everyone who made time to talk. I came back with more ideas than I left with and a few potential collaborations I am very much looking forward to. And thank you to the CloudFest team for putting together an event that actually brings the right people into the same room. That is harder than it looks. See you next year!

Do you know what the Data Privacy Framework is? And do you know it might not survive? Most don't. So here is the short version. The EU and US have tried three times to create a legal basis for moving European data to American infrastructure. Safe Harbor. Privacy Shield. Now the Data Privacy Framework. The first two were struck down by the same court. Same reason each time: US surveillance law and EU privacy law are structurally incompatible. The third deal was signed in 2023. It was built on a Biden executive order and an independent oversight board called the PCLOB. Since then, the PCLOB has been gutted. No quorum. No new members nominated. It cannot investigate. It cannot report. And FISA Section 702 (the surveillance law at the center of every ruling) is up for reauthorization next month. Max Schrems, who killed the first two frameworks, is preparing a broader challenge. Nordic data protection authorities are warning companies to prepare exit plans. I am not predicting a date. But I can see a pattern. The teams that will be fine are the ones who stopped treating compliance as a checkbox and started treating sovereignty as architecture. If your provider answers to US law, your compliance story has a dependency you do not control. That is not a political opinion but a structural fact. Is your team building for the post-DPF world, or hoping it holds? #dataprotection #saas #sovereignty

The recent large-scale outages where key centralized services have taken countless organizations offline serve as a sharp reminder: Control and ownership NEEDS TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY in our digital operations. For Ormilon, we refuse to have our business continuity dictated by the stability (or lack thereof) of third-party platforms. I'm of the opinion that true operational resilience comes from holding the keys in my own hands. This principle drove our strategic decision at Ormilon: We chose to implement Nextcloud as our self-hosted workspace solution. This was one of many decisions to gain digital sovereignty and operate outside the sphere of external vendor dependency. For those wondering what Nextcloud has to offer, details below.