About Me
A computer on its own never fascinated me. What fascinated me was what people could create with one, and that wonder took hold early. As a kid I spent every coin of my savings on an Amiga 500. I could read just a tiny little bit of English, had no mentor, and no one to learn from, so I learned the only way I could, one mistake at a time.
The real magic arrived the first time I connected two computers. A null-modem cable, a modem handshake, and suddenly the machine wasn’t the point at all. Connection was. That spark grew into my first BNC network, built with my brother and my neighbor. In my early twenties, around the turn of the 2000s, it became something much bigger. My friends and I started turning community halls into gaming arenas, events that grew from 40 people to more than 820. I ran cable across floors, rerouted switches when PCs refused to connect, and wrestled aging electrical systems into powering hundreds of monitors, always on a shoestring budget and an impossible deadline. The reward was never the wiring. It was the moment the room came alive.
My apprenticeship was where it all became real. I designed and built networks for small and medium companies, and that was where I learned what it means to own the full stack, from the cabling in the walls to computers, storage, and networking. Not just to build it, but to keep it running. That foundation carried me into a degree in Telecommunication and Network Engineering at the University of Applied Sciences Fulda, and then into professional network monitoring at an ISP, working in open source.
Open source taught me the same old lesson at first, one mistake at a time. But this time something was different. When I started with OpenNMS, I found people on IRC who helped me grow and answered a stranger’s questions with real patience and generosity. They became friends I still admire today. Now we learned together.
Today I’m an individual contributor and advisor to the OpenNMS project. What drives me isn’t the code for its own sake. It’s the work that makes a genuine difference for the people who use it. I still remember both feelings, the kid alone with a manual he couldn’t read, and the newcomer who was finally welcomed in, so I try to build with empathy for the next person walking through the same door.
The rooms have grown over the years, from a lone Amiga, to two cabled computers, to a hall of 820, to entire networks. But the mission has never changed. It’s about technology that brings people together, and there’s still no greater thrill than watching the room come alive.
What I’m doing today
- Individual contributor and advisor for strategic partners and stakeholders using and building the open source network monitoring platform OpenNMS Horizon/Meridian
- Contact manager for our German development team and first point of contact for OpenNMS customers and partners in Europe
- Collaborating with people across different cultures and time zones
Maintainer and contributor to open source projects, including:
- nl6 — load testing and performance analysis for monitoring tools
- Blitsbom — lightweight SBOM analysis tool for open source projects
- Blittermib — Web based SNMP MIB browser
Research and Eduction
- Research assistant in the Computer Science department at University of Applied Sciences Fulda
- Lecturer Computer Science department at University of Applied Sciences Fulda
- Distributed systems
- Network communication
- Network and system monitoring and introduction to configuration management
- Cisco Academy program Cisco IP telephony and CCNA and volunteered in lab documentation for the CCNP course program
- Wrote Diplom degree dissertation about outsourcing of network monitoring functions
Volunteering
- Speaker about open culture and open source technology at various events like OSMC, OUCE, FOSDEM, Linux Tag
- Mentor HHN Barcamp 2023 - Green IT & Nachhaltigkeit
- Mentor HHN Barcamp 2023 - KI with KI Salon at Heilbronn University of Applied Sciences
- Mentor GSoC 2013: Distribute an instance of OpenNMS across different physical machines to improve availability and scalability
- Mentor GSoC 2012: Integration of Flume and ElasticSearch to analyze big log data
- 2010: Co-founder OpenNMS Foundation Europe e.V.
- 2010: Co-founder Hacker space Magrathea Laboratories e.V.
- Event coordinator and speaker at annually OpenNMS User Conference Europe (OUCE) from 2009 - 2018
- 2000: Co-founder MCL2k organizing LAN-Parties up to 828 people
Places I’ve worked
- 2023 - today: Individual contributor and advisor supporting strategic partners and stakeholders
- 2022 - 2023: Joined the product management team at OpenNMS as a subject-matter expert for network monitoring and performance management
- 2015 - 2022: Full-time contributor at The OpenNMS Group, advocating for open source network monitoring solutions
- 2011 - 2015: Research assistant in the Computer Science Department at Hochschule Fulda
- 2010 - 2015: Freelance advocate for the open source network monitoring platform OpenNMS
- 2007 - 2010: Worked at NETHINKS GmbH building network monitoring solutions and services with OpenNMS and other open source monitoring tools
- 1998 - 2004: Worked at Drimalski & Partner GmbH designing and implementing IT network infrastructure, network security, and Microsoft Active Directory environments
Education
- 2001 - 2006, Diplom-Inform. (HS), University of Applied Sciences in Fulda, Telecommunication / Network Engineering
- 2000 - 2001, Worked as an IT system engineer, did some industry certifications around network security, network design
- 1998 - 2000, Apprenticeship IT system engineer
Publications
- 09 / 2023: OpenNMS Horizon and Flows ADMIN-Magazine Issue 77
- 05 / 2023: Fischen im Fluss, Mehr Durchblick im Netzwerk mit OpenNMS Horizon und Flows im Linux Magazin
- 03 / 2014: OCS Integration mit OpenNMS im ADMIN-Magazin
- 05 / 2013: X-rayed: VMware monitoring with OpenNMS im Linux Magazine
- 02 / 2013: Durchleuchtet: VMware-Monitoring mit OpenNMS im ADMIN-Magazin
- 07 / 2012: Monitoring VMware-based Virtual Infrastructures with OpenNMS 8th CSECS Boston University
- 06 / 2010: OpenNMS – Netzwerkmanagement mit feier Software dpunkt Verlag
- 05 / 2009: Rundumkontrolle – Enterprise-Netzwerk-Management mit OpenNMS in iX