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. Active across the org in Java, Python, Go, and JavaScript.
• CNCF Ambassador — advocating for cloud-native practices and helping bridge between projects and users.
• JUnit Pioneer maintainer — a JUnit 5 extension pack.
• Speaker — KubeCon, Devoxx, JavaCro, JCON, Cloudland, ContainerDays, and meetups across Europe.
• Consulting & workshops — see services for what that looks like in practice.

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), then ran a small software company for three years building GPS-based tools for waste-collection fleets. 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.

The thread across all of it: I care most about the people. Helping engineers grow, helping first-time contributors find their footing, helping communities outlive their founders.

Speaking

I speak regularly on feature flagging, observability, and developer experience. Full list with abstracts on /talks or Sessionize.

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.