Hi there 👋
I'm Michael, software engineer from Germany. My official title is Senior Staff Software Engineer and I work at Neo4j. Titles which theoretically would fit as well "does stuff with or do computers", "break things as a service" and "source of endless rants" 😉.
I have been working in IT since the early 2000s. My goto language of choice is Java ☕️. I am a published author ("Spring Boot - Moderne Softwareentwicklung im Spring Ökosystem", DE 2018 and arc42 by example, EN 2014 – 2015) and a recognized Java Champion. In recognition and appreciation for my technical and community leadership contributions to the Oracle communities worldwide demonstrated during June 2022 – May 2023 through my work regarding GraalVM I was presented an Oracle Ace Associate award in 2024.
I am a Spring User for more than a decade and one of my earliest projects (Dailyfratze) is still around, alive and kicking. In 2015 I founded the Java user group EuregJUG Maas-Rhine together with @dl1ely.
I have contributed to broad number of frameworks and ecosystems, such as
Since 2018 I am the maintainer of Spring Data Neo4j and Neo4j-OGM together with @meistermeier.
I created the following projects which I do actively maintain:
- Cypher-DSL: A query builder for Neo4js query language Cypher, heavily inspired by jOOQ.
- Neo4j-Migrations: Database refactoring toolkit for Neo4j, with integrations for Quarkus and Spring Boot and a native CLI
- biking2: A project around cycling which I used to learn Spring Boot and educate about Spring Boot
- scrobbles4j: Years of giving talks about relational databases and tracking listening habbits culminated in a life application displaying my latest songs
My effort for the Neo4j Testcontainers integration started back in 2018 and cumulated in Neo4j being one of six launch partners for the AtomicJar official Testcontainers modules. In mid 2023 I was recognized by AtomicJar as Community Champion together with a great group of other champions. I feel really honored to be part of that group.
For my work integration the Neo4j Java-Driver and Neo4j-OGM into Quarkus with Quarkus-Neo4j and Neo4j-Quarkus-OGM I was awarded 3 times in a row with "I Made Quarkus" (1.x, 2.x and 3.x).
Since 2019 I was the driving author behind making the Neo4j-Java-Driver compatible and officially tested with GraalVM, see 634, 663 and neo4j-java-driver-native-smoke-tests.
I am the project lead for the Neo4j JDBC Driver v6, including a unique approach of translating SQL to Cypher, by combining jOOQ and the Cypher-DSL.
In 2023 I started writing my third book, DuckDB in Action, together with Michael Hunger and Mark Needham.
Last but not least, I have this Advent of Code repository in which I went a bit nuts in terms of programming languages: I love Java, but I try to stay on top of other things, too.
Apart from all of that, I have a blog info.michael-simons.eu, my slides are on speakerdeck, I answer stuff on stackoverflow and I do have a LinkedIn profile. However, my primary feed is on Mastodon, I am @rotnroll666@mastodon.social. My old Twitter account still exists, but I refuse to give this company any more content and you shouldn't either.
