About

I’m Simon — a software engineer from Austria. I work across the stack but spend most of my time around developer experience, feature flagging, and cloud-native tooling.

My mission: help teams release faster and with more confidence. That comes from open standards, honest feedback loops, and communities that genuinely welcome newcomers.

What I do

• OpenFeature maintainer — the vendor-neutral standard for feature flagging in the CNCF landscape.
• CNCF Ambassador — advocating for cloud-native practices and helping bridge between projects and users.
• JUnit Pioneer maintainer — a JUnit 5 extension pack.
• Contributor to keptn, and occasionally JUnit 5, SonarJava, GitLab, and whatever else I need to fix.

Background

I started programming in PHP as a teenager, picked up ActionScript 3 during university (first job was technically in Silicon Valley — the desk was, anyway), ran a two-person company for three years, and spent almost a decade deep in the Java toolchain: Gradle, SonarQube, CI/CD, the unglamorous plumbing that lets teams ship.

Over time I drifted from “make the Java build faster” to “make the whole release cycle more confident.” Feature flags, observability, and open standards turned out to be the shortest path there — which is how I ended up maintaining OpenFeature.

Speaking

I speak regularly on feature flagging, observability, and developer experience. Recent and upcoming stops include KubeCon EU, Devoxx, JavaCro, JCON, Cloudland, ContainerDays, and JNation. Full list and abstracts on Sessionize.

Outside work

Family, cooking (the more questionable the method, the better), and a small non-profit called togtrama that runs open-air cinemas, flea markets, and carnival parades in the village I grew up in.