Michael Forster
Principal Software Engineer at Google
Munich, Bavaria, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Forster is a Principal Software Engineer based in Munich with 26 years of experience building high-performance systems across Java, C++, web UI, databases and algorithm design. He holds a PhD from Universität Passau and has blended deep research roots with industry leadership at Google, Celonis and Siemens, moving between hands-on engineering and director-level responsibilities. At Google he has driven long-term architectural work and continues to do so in his current principal role, while at Celonis he transitioned into engineering leadership—demonstrating facility with both code and organizational delivery. An active open-source contributor, he improves developer experience and runtime stability in prominent projects such as the Fish shell and TensorFlow runtime, and has contributed DevOps-focused fixes to jj, a Git-compatible VCS. Notably, his open-source contributions emphasize build reproducibility and developer tooling—small, high-leverage improvements that keep large projects healthy.
26 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Computer Science Mathematics, PhD Computer Science Mathematics at Universität Passau
Stackoverflow
9,316reputation
1.0mreached
31answers
3questions
stream
top-1%
java
top-1%
io
top-5%
Github Skills (30)
dependency-management10
nix10
llvm10
flake10
cicd10
java10
stream10
bazel10
build-automation10
shell10
rust10
cookie10
devops10
cli10
utf9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
jj-vcs/jj
Jan 2023 - Jan 2023
A Git-compatible VCS that is both simple and powerful
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:25 reviews, 8 commits, 12 PRs in 8 days
Contributions summary:Michael's contributions primarily focus on improving the project's build and development environment. They addressed a Nix-related build issue, configuring a formatter for Nix and setting up a development shell environment. Furthermore, the user optimized the Nix build process by filtering source files and refining the flake.nix configuration. The changes indicate a focus on improving the developer experience and build efficiency within the project.
hacklangvcsversion-controlsubversiongit-client
fish-shell/fish-shell
Jun 2022 - Jul 2022
The user-friendly command line shell.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:1 review, 7 commits, 1 PR in 29 days
Contributions summary:Michael contributed to the fish-shell project by implementing features related to cursor selection behavior. They introduced a new environment variable to control cursor selection, making it inclusive or exclusive. Additionally, they added tests using pexpect to verify the behavior under different cursor selection settings. Finally, they addressed the cursor width when calculating the selection's end.
bashterminalfishcommand-lineshell
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.