My 5th Year at GitLab: Developer Advocate Journey, AI Adventures, and Finding Balance
Join me in my 5th year at GitLab - from ambitious Staff Developer Advocate promotion, leading AI initiatives, traveling Europe for events, and building meaningful connections. A story of growth, challenges, and the joy of working with a global remote team while staying true to personal passions.
Every March, I take time to reflect on my journey at GitLab. Last year's "Michi Limited Edition: 4 Years All-Remote at GitLab" captured my growth from Developer Advocate to emerging AI enthusiast. This fifth year has been transformative - reaching Staff Developer Advocate, diving deep into AI innovation, and learning the delicate art of balancing ambition with well-being.
Many great memories shaped 2024 - from inspiring customer interactions across Europe to breakthrough moments in AI and Embedded Systems. In this reflection, I'll share my experiences, insights, and vulnerable moments from a year that challenged and rewarded me in unexpected ways. While writing this helps me process my journey, I hope it also inspires your own professional and personal growth.
For those new to my annual reflections - welcome! This post focuses on my fifth year, highlighting key achievements, learning moments, and honest reflections on successes and challenges. Let's dive in.
Five Years of Growth: Looking Back to Move Forward
Five years of reflection tell a story of continuous evolution and growth. From my first steps into remote work during a global pandemic to becoming what some call a "GitLab celebrity," each year shaped a unique chapter:
Year 1 was about discovering the power of asynchronous work and remote culture, learning to contribute while remaining true to myself.
Year 2 brought vision and momentum as I deepened my DevRel expertise and found my voice in the community.
Year 3 taught me to embrace the unknown, pushing beyond my comfort zone while maintaining work-life harmony.
Year 4 became my "Limited Edition" year, where I explored AI possibilities and expanded my impact across teams.
Now, Year 5 brings these threads together: technical leadership, AI innovation, and the art of sustainable growth. Each challenge and experience builds upon the lessons of previous years, creating a journey that's uniquely mine while inspiring others to forge their own paths.
As I look ahead to my sixth year, my passion for learning and innovation continues to grow. The intersection of AI and Embedded Systems presents exciting new territories to explore, building on the foundation of all these years while pushing into uncharted waters.
My key learnings in my 5th-year all-remote at GitLab
- Think strategically and align projects/content/events to business goals. I shared my FY26 plan early in an internal Google doc and then epics (DevRel events, for example) to help with transparency. Research and forecast industry and customer needs, even when it sounds impossible. Focus on executive summaries, results, plans, and documentation (event result reports).
- A Developer Advocate is a genuinely cross-functional role that requires close collaboration with customers, sales, marketing, product, and engineering to achieve impactful results. When not visible on the GitLab blog or at events, I enjoy hosting a customer consulting workshop, researching content for field and leadership requests, or working on product/engineering projects to innovate with customers.
- Traveling across Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and the UK was fun, but I need breaks and better travel connections. While visiting four major cities in four weeks was a little exhausting, it was also one of the best experiences of my career. It inspired me to explore more cities and spots and meet friends.
- Make room for others. Do not answer everything immediately; loop in teammates and ensure everyone can contribute. This also provides time to focus on projects because sometimes I act like, "Oh, a cat <runs into a different direction like ALF>" and later return, "What was I doing before?". My bias for action is strong, but I cannot always help everyone. If you are waiting in my DMs - I suggest finding a different path.
- I enjoy the flexible work hours when working remotely. Working on the train is no problem, and spending an extra after-event day visiting a customer is engaging. I also appreciate going for extended lunch, during-the-day grocery shopping, favorite car service, or early family and friends dinner. I also enjoy my home office, large 49" screen, powerful hardware and tools, and many Easter eggs that put a smile on my face daily.
When you are ready for all the memories, learnings, ups and downs, goals and reviews, continue reading 😄
That warm fuzzy feeling ... In-person GitLab Summit
After four years, the GitLab Summit in Las Vegas felt like a heartwarming reunion. From the moment our Lufthansa captain asked, "Everyone who works at GitLab, raise your hands now," to the final goodbyes, every moment reinforced our unique company culture.
The highlights were deeply human: I joined my teammates to create care packages for local homeless people, conquered my fear of heights at Area 15's 140-foot-high bar (getting older makes these adventures more thrilling!), and explored the surreal Omega Mart together. Sid Sijbrandij's kindness was everywhere, from initiating a code challenge with a DJ-set prize to bringing snacks during flight delays.
What struck me most was how natural it felt when everyone searched for "Michi." After years of remote work, connecting in person with colleagues felt like meeting old friends. The Summit reminded me why I love being part of this global team - we're not just coworkers but a community that genuinely enjoys learning and growing together. 💜
🦊 Michael Friedrich 🌈
Meeting community and customers
QCon and InfoQ Dev Summit
I was fortunate to speak at QCon London in April, and meet many of the fine folks at InfoQ. This engagement led to an invitation to speak later in the year at InfoQ Dev Summit Munich, too. My QCon track host was fantastic in helping me build an engaging story and talk "Efficient DevSecOps Workflows with a little help from AI" – thank you deeply, Bilgin Ibryam, you and the friendly Diagrid team made a fantastic impact.
InfoQ Dev Summit Munich helped me understand LLMs better - shoutout to Ines Montani for your insightful talk on human-in-the-loop and LLM distillation, still have it in my head. I truly enjoyed thoughtful and cheerful conversations with speakers and attendees, and hallway track brainstorming sessions.
🦊 Michael Friedrich 🌈
Open Source @ Siemens, Open Source in Finance Forum, Cloud Expo Frankfurt
Open Source @ Siemens was actually my first time traveling to Switzerland. Picked up my team mate Raimund Hook at the airport to join a customer workshop first, and then enjoy dinner and preparing for engaging 2 days of open source, and hearing great adoption stories about GitLab, CI/CD and AI. The Open Source @ Siemens team contributes A LOT to GitLab, and their community spirit is truly amazing. Glad to see so many smiling faces.
🦊 Michael Friedrich 🌈
Spontaneous hop to Open Source in Finance Forum London, joining the wonderful team at the GitLab booth and delicious Korean BBQ dinner later.
Cloud Expo Frankfurt brought a surprise – meeting Wil Spillane in person for the first time, fellow alumni and my social media counterpart friend in my early GitLab days.
DevOps Camp Nuremberg, IT-Tage, Container Days
DevOps Camp Nuremberg 2024 was a highlight again – barcamp/hallway track style, on the first day, 3 individuals pitched 3 sessions on AI, that worked very well together - learning LLMs with Ollama, DevSecOps use cases with AI, and Infrastructure as Code with AI.
I was so inspired that I prepared a session based on a to-read iX article – AI Agent frameworks, which we then learned live together on Sunday.
🦊 Michael Friedrich 🌈
IT-Tage in Frankfurt was my first time in person, and I really liked the well-informed and high quality conversations at the GitLab booth, and after my talk. Got some fresh ideas for AI use cases that cannot easily be solved - thanks for the backdoor detection challenge, Nina Wagner. Also shoutout to Christian Kühn – good to see you after such a long time.
I really enjoyed my time in Hamburg at Container Days, meeting friends old and new. Spent a bit of time chatting with Matthias Ritter – we met in a monitoring project in my ex-job, and shared lots of memories and current ideas.
When the Container Days folks asked for CFP reviewer help in 2025, I immediately applied, seeking to help a great community event. You will see more of my activities soon – watch their LinkedIn. I think that Container Days provide the right level of everything - time to engage and make new friends, learn in tracks, and inspire innovation. And Hamburg is just a gorgeous city to visit and spend time.
Simon Hönscheid
GitLab DACH Roadshow 2024
GitLab DACH Roadshow Frankfurt – joined Raimund for the Community/Co-create track and show customers how to contribute to GitLab in a hands-on workshop.
At that time, we were talking a lot about GitLab Duo AI use cases already, and I thought – what if I could repurpose the QCon London talk into an AI/GitLab Duo use cases talk for the GitLab DACH Roadshow? And what if I could take over the speaking slot for all remaining events to share the same learnings with different audiences? Field marketing and sales teams were excited, and so I started planning my content updates and travel – from Dusseldorf to Zurich to Berlin to Vienna to Stuttgart.
André Wölfing
Alexander Rusa
🦊 Michael Friedrich 🌈
I truly enjoyed meeting customers, and engage with the GitLab team. I asked a lot of questions about how sales workflows work and got great talk feedback - thank you, Diana Stoleru, Caroline Häming, Sarah Bouchtaoui, Artem Balitskiy. Every roadshow stop brought new product and talk ideas – if you were in Stuttgart you probably got the 110% version. Fortunately, the slides are public for everyone to learn and available in my talk archive.
Engaging with customers and sharing my knowledge at all these stops has been a career highlight for me – I'm game for the DACH Roadshow 2025. Shoutout to Sarina Kraft for all the organization, and encouragement to contribute. 💜
Collaboration, growth and promotion
Someone at GitLab Summit said "You are a celebrity at GitLab" which felt intimidating at first but it is true. I love to being everywhere, helping, sharing thoughts, and contributing cross-functionally. Team members and wider community members know that they can reach out for help.
Helping others succeed
The GitLab Women TMRG started the next mentoring program, and I gladly help with mentoring – sharing my knowledge, resources, experience, network, thoughts while learning about data engineering myself :) More mentee success stories: Pauline is doing fantastic, got fast promoted to Senior Manager of Community at Vercel. Aakansha has exponentially grown and is looking for her next career step – please help her out if you know someone in the DevRel/Engineering space. Sabrina recently finished her first year as Developer Advocate at Qdrant (a scalable vector database for RAG embeddings). Heartwarming to follow their success moments 💜
Global AI Subject Matter Expert
My knowledge on AI use cases has exponentially grown since my fourth year, where I first started exploring GitLab Duo. What began as curiosity in my previous reflection has evolved into confidence to do live programming with AI – you'll never know what happens and need to react fast.
I often share my expertise with field teams for customer requests, help inform the product strategy, and ensure that everyone understands what is happening in the industry – high-level executive, or low-level engineering architecture. I also focus on best practices content, things that I researched and learned myself.
The live stream with Eddie Jaoude was truly epic - implementing adhoc ideas in a 3 hours session.
Fellow Solution Architects and Customer Success team members then looped me into GitLab Duo showcase workshops, where I did live programming with GitLab Duo and AI with customers - first in Python, later in C++ and Embedded. And a little bit of troubleshooting and support, while learning about sales workflows and collaboration – thank you, Manjeet Singh, Dan Rabinowitz, Manuel Kraft, Mirko Brandner, Julia Gätjens, Florian Giner, Sarah Matthies.
Over many conversations, that "old code, needs modernization" theme emerged more clearly. When customers asked if GitLab Duo would support COBOL, I took on the challenge to learn COBOL from scratch – with a little help from AI.
And so many more possibilities ... my career helps me tremendously here. C/C++ for 20 years, learning Rust since 2020, and generally the desire to help, even if I don't understand the programming language. Very refreshing to see that everything comes back, even if you feel you never brought your learnings to action.
Michael Friedrich
Shoutout to Tim Zallmann who always brings me up to speed into current product development, and the past pacing industry. Laurena Alves and Aathira Nair who have been a joy to collaborate with on Product Marketing and AI strategies.
2024 Challenge: A personal README
Challenge for 2024: Improve communication, and be more thoughtful in collaboration. Remove the forceful context, encourage for honest and actionnable feedback through a personal README, and learn more about team psychological safety, and leadership. [source]
My onboarding issue from 2020-03-02 had 2 unticked boxes. One of them was to create a personal README to help everyone understand my work values, strengths and weaknesses, how to work with me, how to find me, experience and engagements. After multiple drafts, I went with bias for action to merge the MR.
Maintain an important project: The GitLab handbook
I became a backend maintainer for the GitLab handbook, after helping bring it into a stable state after migrating to Hugo. Collaborating in a group of cross-functional volunteers who look after Hugo, CI/CD pipelines, Docsy theme components, and help team members has been a career highlight for me. Shoutout to Cynthia Ng for being an excellent collaborator and leader.
Promotion to Staff Developer Advocate
And last but not least, since it took me a while to realize, ... I GOT PROMOTED. Rebooting my career when joining GitLab in March 2020, the Staff level was my ambitious goal, and I am glad to have reached it super fast after 4.5 years.
"I have arrived" isn't just a saying, I screamed it out 😄
When I joined GitLab in March 2020, reaching Staff level seemed like an ambitious dream. Looking back at my first year's blog post where I was learning the ropes of remote work and DevRel, to now leading AI initiatives and cross-functional projects, this promotion feels like a milestone in a carefully crafted journey.
🦊 Michael Friedrich 🌈
Next: Principal Developer Advocate. Or equivalent. I keep my options open to becoming a people manager and lead my own team, when there is an opportunity in the business. Though, my manager John Coghlan, team and organization are fantastic humans, and I don't want to leave them easily.
Ups and downs
Good but also bad things to learn and grow from.
Managing AI Overwhelm
My problem: I will need to clone myself 10 times to tackle all ideas with AI use case adoption, and what the industry brings up – basically a new RAG agent workflow everyday. I've taken a step back and read and learn on-demand from bookmarks, internal knowledge sharing Slack channels, and high quality practitioners I follow on LinkedIn. AI also requires me to stop more often and see the business value, and also develop that sense of "passing me by".
AI won't replace a developer, but what are those things it can do really well, and what context does it need? How to responsibly adopt AI, agents, RAG, and what guardrails are needed? These are the critical business questions in 2025 for successful adoption.
Embedded inspires home automation
After many years, learning Embedded at work finally brought a use case at home. While my previous annual reflections focused on cloud and DevOps, this year marks a return to my hardware roots. I always struggled with that, not wanting work stuff in my spare time, fearing overload and burnout.
A real problem with my plants: Overwatered, no sunlight, and not healthy. After research, I found the Fyta Beam ecosystem, and how well it integrates with Home Assistant. Asked a friend (how they run Home Assistant (thanks Michael) - with the OS image deployment on a Raspberry Pi, easy upgrades, no hassle, fast integration. Benefit for private self: Bought the same Raspberry Pi setup which I got for work projects, and assembled and ran Home Assistant with Fyta sensors, and Philips Hue bridge in an afternoon. Success <3
Since then, I move my plants around, add fresh earth, and inspected what else I could monitor and automate with Home Assistant.
Finding balance - social media, newsletter, too excited
2024 led me to social media burnout. Did not enjoy posting things anymore. Twitter/X went down with - for me - unacceptable political views, and Bluesky got more traction. A perfect chance to reduce social media activity – locked my X account, and continued slow on Bluesky. In reality, I don't post much these days and focus more on brain yoga with LEGO bricks and Google maps travel destinations.
Michael Friedrich
Stopped writing the Ops in Dev newsletter. Creating content all the time as developer advocate, at some point I reached tired "ENOBRAIN". For self-care reasons, I made a hard stop, deleted the buttondown account and subscriber data, and kept the public archive online. I'm glad though for the learning experience and all the engagement from you :)
Too excited: My work research projects received great internal feedback, and leadership appreciation. This excitement has put me into "I can do everything now" mode in January 2025, and while I should know better that long evening hours of work are not healthy, yet here we are. I'm climbing from feeling burned to focussed impactful work, and leisure activities that make me happy (new LEGO builds soon). My manager takes good care of me, and I love his honest feedback.
🦊 Michael Friedrich 🌈
This kind of "not everything works perfect" keeps me challenged, and my personal talent assessment continues to remind me about the Eisenhower Matrix.
2025 challenge: Embedded expertise
I thrive in new challenges. When I met customers in the Embedded vertical, including auto-motive, telco and medical research in 2024, I was very excited to hear about their challenges, and how GitLab and AI could help. My studies in Hardware/Software Systems Engineerings are 20 years back, but some stories sounded oddly familiar.
I thought about the following iterations to level up my expertise:
- Homelab hardware and developer kits, with similar use cases to enterprise production. I already bought Raspberry Pis for AI (did not work), Arduino and FPGA kits in 2024, but never found the time really.
- Learn from fellow team members and subject matter experts, and jump right into the hot water at Embedded World 2025 in March in Nuremberg, I'm local.
- Darwin Sanoy created a fantastic Embedded DevOps learning course, with hands-on hardware and development with CI and Sec in GitLab. While learning, I started automating my Raspberry Pi setup with Ansible, because I love reproducible environments. More on those learnings soon.
My overall goal is to combine AI with Embedded use cases when possible, and keep me challenged with code, automation, and new technology in my stack.
2024 Goal review
From 2024: https://dnsmichi.at/2024/03/02/michi-limited-edition-4-years-all-remote-at-gitlab/#onwards-to-year-5
Career goals: Contribute to more cross-functional initiatives, and lead innovative strategy proposals to create impactful results for customers, like the GitLab Duo Coffee Chat. Learn Ruby-on-Rails, VueJS and contribute to GitLab, the code base. Get promoted to Staff Developer Advocate.
- Cross-functional initiatives, and impactful results for customers ✅ You will see more outcomes in 2025.
- Get promoted to Staff Developer Advocate ✅ What a ride and appreciation. 💜
- Contribute to GitLab 👀 No time. Hoping to get more learning impulse from AI when GitLab Duo Workflow AI Agents moves towards GA.
Personal goals: Explore new hiking spots, visit friends all over the world, and attend community events without work relation (Rejekts in private was so refreshing!). Build a home lab to run Kubernetes and AI workloads, and maybe build a gaming desktop for gaming.
- New hiking spots, more private travel 👀 Was actually exhausted from work travel, and tried to combine event locations with meeting friends. Enjoyed Open Source @ Siemens, DevOps Camp Nuremberg, Container Days and the DACH Roadshows a lot. Got inspired to visit Switzerland more often in 2025 - the lakes, the mountains, the friendly people. 🥰
- Build a homelab to run Kubernetes (no) and AI workloads (yes, with Embedded hardware focus) ✅ Could not do everything, and focussed on AI only.
- Build a gaming desktop ✅ Red Dead Redemption 2 kept me fascinated in 2024. Upgraded the gaming desktop later to run LLMs, because it helps with learning and being curious.
Encouraged everyone to create their personal achievements log to reflect and appreciate ✅
Aakansha Priya
Outlook into 2025
I'm always ambitious but became more thoughtful over the years, testing my limits, finding new ways to contribute and lead, and learning how to better refresh my batteries. Lets see if I can reach my goals in 2025 :)
Career goals
- Lead responsible AI use case adoption and continue working closely with e-group, leadership, team members and customers. Contribute impactful results to business objectives.
- Get to senior knowledge level on Embedded use cases, and help and innovate with customers in SCM, CI, Sec and AI. Get talks accepted to share the learnings.
- Continue the path to "Enterprise Developer Advocate" with strong customer focus and close collaboration with sales, product, engineering, marketing, strategy.
Personal goals
- Better balance work travel with personal travel excitements. Plan holidays early. "Go there to meet friends" – DevOps Camp Nuremberg, Container Days, Open Source at Siemens.
- Continue building the Home Automation setup, and balance a personal mental vulnerability with "Don't want to burnout with technology in my private life". Migrate from vim to neovim, inspired by DevOps Camp Nuremberg sessions.
- Use the new walking pad with standing desk, and the table microphone instead of headphones more often.
Thinking of "I have arrived", "Michi, the celebrity", and my joy I bring to work every day, the future will be exciting, challenging, and rewarding. Onwards to the next 5+ years together! 🚀 🤗
🦊 Michael Friedrich 🌈
For transparency: This post was written by myself, and then edited and revised with a little help from AI and Claude. The cover image collage was also created with a little help from AI - this Python script worked well without writing a line of code myself.