About
Hi, I'm Michael Friedrich aka dnsmichi, located in the Nuremberg area, Germany. All-remote at GitLab as Principal Developer Advocate.
Connect with me on LinkedIn - Bluesky - Mastodon - GitLab - Instagram 🦊
"Michi" is the lovely version of "Michael" in German. It is hard to pronounce in English [mee ch ee], "Friedrich" [free dree ch|ck] is a tongue breaker too. Just go with the English pronunciation of "Michael" [mai - kl] :)
I'm a thought leader, educator, researcher, community builder, customer advocate, connecting-people-in-open-circles networker, developer, backend engineer, DNS debugger, and SecOps practitioner. I love new learning challenges - such as AI from scratch since 2023, or Embedded DevSecOps going back to my roots. Everything I learn is shared in public talks, blog tutorials, demos, workshops and more.
For collaboration requests, please follow the Developer Advocate request template. LinkedIn and other channels might work, but expect delays due to high volume.
Life is an adventure
In 1995ish, we had 486 desktop PCs in school. By default, they would run with 33Mhz frequency, and had a so-called "Turbo boost" button to increase to 66 MHz. I was curious - why would this button exist, and 66 Mhz not be the default? A few years later, someone advertised university studies as "We can teach you how a computer works.". I was fascinated and worked hard to get accepted, after finishing high school.
My learning adventure started in 2002 studying at the University of Applied Sciences Hagenberg in Austria. Hardware/Software Systems Engineering with the "DI (FH)" degree. I learned the embedded basics with C/Assembly on microcontrollers, C++/C# on win32, VHDL FPGA simulation and synthesis, and more advanced hardware circuit design, RTOS and USB driver development. The year-long study project in 2004/05 "Little Spider" involved servos controlled with an FPGA, and a microcontroller orchestrating the movement with xyz coordinates and inverse kinematics.
In 2005, I moved to Vienna, writing my diploma thesis at mobilkom Austria (now A1). The topics involved NFC and multimedia streaming appliances on mobile. While managing the network for the biggest students dorm in Austria (1800+ students), I came in contact with ACO.net, the University of Vienna, and nic.at. I've been with them from 2009 til 2012 and helped manage the .at and .ac.at/univie.ac.at DNS zones while engaging with monitoring development.
DNS + Michi (lovely version of Michael in German) = dnsmichi
During this time, I added Oracle and PostgreSQL backend support to an OSS monitoring tool, required by the University tech stack. PostgreSQL support inspired NASA to install the monitoring tool on the ISS to collect metrics observing the universe (1, 2).
After starting the monitoring v2 development in early 2012, I decided to hop on a new adventure and moved from Vienna, Austria, to Nuremberg, Germany, where I joined NETWAYS in late 2012 as consultant and developer. I engaged at DevOps events to learn about Docker, Kubernetes, Prometheus, Elasticsearch, Ansible and better understand the cloud-native environments and monitoring innovation needs. For 11 years until March 2020, I was a maintainer, community builder, backend engineer, social media advocate, support enthusiast, and public speaker of said OSS monitoring project. It inspired my future path with transparent open source work.
2018 kicked off my career as Git and GitLab trainer, and I have been educating customers with modern development workflows and the importance of CI/CD and DevSecOps.
Everyone in the OSS monitoring community recognizes dnsmichi, no nick name change.
The Prometheus /metrics endpoint added to Docker in 2016 made me curious about the future of whitebox monitoring, and better Observability. This led to my future career path and job changes in 2020, seeing Prometheus and Kubernetes also in the GitLab tech stack.
Everyone can contribute
In March 2020, I joined GitLab as Developer Evangelist, later renamed Developer Advocate. I am working in our lovely Developer Advocacy team with Fatima, John, William, Itzik, Cesar, Fern, Daniel and Colleen on content (tutorials, blog posts, documentation, demos, webinars, etc.), events (speaking, coaching, booth support, etc.) and community and customer engagement (co-create, consultancy). Most recently, I have focused on and contributed to the AI-native vision for GitLab, including product innovation, UX design, and GTM strategy.
I learned that my name and nickname are difficult to pronounce in English. Everyone is super friendly and tries to pronounce them correctly. Dnsmichi, it stays.
I love exploring new technologies and trying new things, no matter how complicated or fragile they are. I also love documenting everything on my journey, which results in blog posts, coffee chat recordings, and social posts. Sourcing from fast-moving technology, we had created a community tech coffee chat called "#EveryoneCanContribute cafe." during the pandemic as a virtual learn-together. My passion for education and workshops led to a series of CI/CD workshops, and the idea to create a learning platform which shares more workshops for (Kubernetes) Observability in 2022. AI on the rise in 2023 changed all plans, though.
I'm interested in AI, DevSecOps, observability, infrastructure as code, cloud-native/containers, security, and learning new programming languages like Rust. My topics often overlap, from SLOs to Pipeline Efficiency to Security to eBPF to OpenTelemetry to Prometheus and Chaos Engineering ... In 2023, I started learning AI, and eBPF. This was covered on the GitLab blog and YouTube Channel. I could not find a business for eBPF, though, and stopped my engagements in favor of AI (and also to not burn out from overloading my brain).
BlogLearning AI from scratch
In 2024, I focused on identifying pain points and telling AI use case adoption stories at QCon London, InfoQ Dev Summit Munich, and the GitLab DACH Roadshow in Düsseldorf, Zurich, Berlin, Vienna, and Stuttgart. I'm also learning AI agents and workflows in public.
In 2025, I brought my Agentic AI learned expertise to users, and engaged with Embedded vertical next to my existing customer activities. The folks at Open Source @ Siemens 2025 loved my AI learning story 💜
At Container Days 2025, Embedded came together with CI and AI, and I had the pleasure to introduce myself as track moderator, too. For the GitLab DACH Roadshow 2025, I created a whole new use case story and a live demo environment – first time confidence with Agentic AI, and custom agents for localized German/Austrian languages.
2026 brings the GA launch of the GitLab Duo Agent Platform, my biggest career impact so far, from developer vision, UX research, CEO-level strategy contributions, engineering&product and GTM collaboration, to end user demo & talk use case creation. I’ll continue with focus on solving use cases, Agentic efficiency, optimization, customization, security&compliance, and share learnings in talks, blog posts, demos :-)
I also plan with more Embedded IoT use cases, and continue learning Java Spring Boot and Rust.
My values
I'm actively engaging with mentoring future thought leaders, and embracing diversity in our communities. The GitLab values make me a better person every day, both professionally and personal. I love transparency, efficiency, assuming positive intent, low level of shame, boring solutions, and short toes.
In 2024, I've created my README for everyone to understand how I work, my strengths, weaknesses, and work values.
You will find many #LEGO models in my remote backgrounds and talks ... and on the NASDAQ tower when GitLab became a public company in 2021 <3
I'm originally from Linz, Austria, and now live in the Nuremberg area in Germany. I love sharing food, tastes, culture - childhood memories like Dragee Keksi only available in Austria, or tasty original gingerbread from Nuremberg. Often, my luggage is a little packed, requiring me to optimize remote work during travel.
🦊 Michael Friedrich 🌈
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Michael Friedrich
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Michael Friedrich
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Michael Friedrich