Who I am

About

I’m Simon, a software engineer from Austria, now working independently. I work across the stack but spend most of my time around feature flagging, engineering practice, and cloud-native tooling.

My mission: I build durable standards and practices so teams can learn, grow, and operate without depending on any single vendor, tool, or person. Release confidence comes out of that, through open standards, honest feedback loops, and communities that genuinely welcome newcomers.

What I take on is on services, where I’m speaking next is on talks, and the projects I maintain are on projects.

How I work

• Technical credibility even over reach.
• Open standards even over my own code.
• The direct ask even over the announcement.
• Other people's confidence even over my name on it.

Each one costs me something I also want.

How I got here

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), then took over a small software company building GPS-based tools for waste-collection fleets and ran it from 2012 until it merged in 2016. That was my first go at leadership, with the clients and the payroll included.

After that, almost a decade deep in the Java toolchain at NETCONOMY: Gradle, SonarQube, CI/CD, the unglamorous plumbing that lets teams ship.

At Dynatrace I shifted from “make the Java build faster” to “make the whole release cycle more confident”, architecting a centralized feature flag management service for all clusters and stages, integrating it with OpenTelemetry, and representing the company inside the OpenFeature community. Feature flags, observability, and open standards turned out to be the shortest path to release confidence, which is how I ended up maintaining OpenFeature.

I captained a team of around eight there, doing the hiring, the growth conversations, and the case for each promotion. I’ve helped engineers grow, helped first-time contributors find their footing, and built a club that will outlive me.

I’ve spent as much time on how teams decide as on what they build, which is what pulled me toward leadership work rather than away from it.

Outside work

Family. Sport climbing instructor with the Alpenverein, running kids’ courses where the real curriculum is confidence and trust. Founder and chair of Togtrama, a community social club in Frohnleiten that runs open-air cinemas, markets, and village events on volunteer enthusiasm alone. Cooking, the more questionable the method the better. And the outdoors, where I’m happiest away from a screen.