About

Hi, I'm Michael Friedrich aka dnsmichi. Austrian living in the Nuremberg area, Germany. All-remote at GitLab as Senior Developer Advocate.

"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, community builder, customer advocate, connecting-the-dot-thinker, developer & ops practitioner. I love AI, DevSecOps, observability, SRE, CI/CD, cloud-native and learning everything in public together. That's how the GitLab Duo Coffee Chat and #EveryoneCanContribute cafe came to life.

Connect with me on LinkedIn - Twitter/X - Mastodon - Bluesky - GitLab - Reddit - Instagram 🦊

For collaboration requests, please ask in public, and provide all context on the why and how, including URLs. You can also follow the Developer Advocate request template and create an issue.

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 adventure started in 2002 with studying at the University of Applied Sciences in Hagenberg, Austria. Hardware/Software Systems Engineering with the "DI (FH)" degree. In 2005 I moved to Vienna, writing my diploma thesis at mobilkom Austria (now A1). The topics involved NFC and multimedia streaming appliances. 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 DNS zone while engaging with monitoring development.

DNS + Michi (lovely version of Michael in German) = dnsmichi

Starting the next generation monitoring development, I decided to hop on a new adventure and moved from Vienna, Austria to NETWAYS and Nuremberg, Germany. From May 2009 until March 2020, I was a maintainer, community builder, backend engineer, social media advocate, support enthusiast, and public speaker of an OSS monitoring project. 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 ...

Everyone can contribute

In March 2020, I joined GitLab as Developer Evangelist, later renamed to Developer Advocate. I am working in our lovely Developer Advocacy team with Fatima, Abubakar, John, William, Itzik, Cesar, Fern on content (tutorials, blog posts, documentation, demos, webinars, etc.), events (speaking, coaching, booth support, etc.) and community and customer engagement activities. Most recently, I focus and contribute to Product adoption initiatives for CI/CD and GitLab Duo (AI).

Learned that my name, and nickname is hard to pronounce in English. Everyone is super friendly trying to pronounce 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, resulting in blog posts, community coffee chats and social shares. Sourcing from fast moving technology, we have created a community tech coffee chat called "#EveryoneCanContribute cafe".

My passion for education and free 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:

I'm interested in 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 ...

Most recently, I started learning AI, and eBPF. This is covered in my newsletter opsindev.news next to other many insights, and the GitLab blog and YouTube Channel.

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.

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 Austrian culture and sweets with the world. Or send some gingerbread from Nuremberg to friends :)