Michael Kohl
Fractional CTO at G&G Independent Insurance
Surat Thani Province, Thailand
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Kohl is a versatile Fractional CTO and founder with over 17 years of hands-on experience building and leading engineering teams across startups and enterprises, now operating from Thailand. He blends deep backend engineering (notably contributions to rubygems/bundler and rubygems core) with security expertise—having improved tool installation and functionality for the Offensive Web Testing Framework. Michael has repeatedly scaled product and platform teams (Gojek Finance, Lockstep Labs, forem) and excels at translating ambiguous product needs into pragmatic, well-architected deliverables. He runs lab428 to provide fractional CTO, architecture, and engineering management services worldwide and has co-founded and advised early-stage ventures including Ultra Messenger. Fluent in both systems engineering and high-level strategy, he pairs mentorship and operational rigor with experience across Ruby, Python, cloud infrastructure, and security tooling. An unusual mix of sinology/math studies and long-term open-source involvement gives him a broad cultural and technical perspective when solving complex problems.
17 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
East Asian Studies - Sinology, East Asian Studies - Sinology at University of ViennaMathematics, Mathematics at FernUniversität in HagenCertificate Chinese as a Foreign Language, Certificate Chinese as a Foreign Language at Tongji University
German, English, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, Thai
Stackoverflow
66,639reputation
4.2mreached
892answers
4questions
mysql
top-5%
sinatra
top-5%
alias
top-5%
rubygems
top-5%
regex
top-1%
oop
top-5%
Github Skills (52)
dependency-manager10
data-conversion10
scripting10
rubygems10
web-application-security10
testing10
regex10
ruby10
security10
recursion10
script10
bundler10
pentesting10
sh10
hash10
Programming languages (33)
Github contributions (5)
owtf/owtf
Feb 2012 - Mar 2012
Offensive Web Testing Framework (OWTF), is a framework which tries to unite great tools and make pen testing more efficient http://owtf.org https://twitter.com/owtfp
Role in this project:
Security Engineer
Security EngineerContributions:12 commits in 1 month
Contributions summary:Michael primarily contributed to the Offensive Web Testing Framework by fixing issues related to tool installation and functionality. They updated scripts for installing and configuring security tools, including Arachni, WhatWeb, and WPScan. They also re-added a HTTP-Traceroute.py file and made minor cleanups to the project's environment setup scripts. The user's changes focused on ensuring the proper functioning of the framework's tools.
pythonbugbountypentestweb-testingpen
rubygems/bundler
Aug 2014 - Aug 2014
Manage your Ruby application's gem dependencies
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits in 6 days
Contributions summary:Michael contributed to the `bundler` project by improving the `bundle show` command. Their work included enhancing the verbose output, removing unnecessary dependencies, and improving the outdated check logic. The user also fixed a spec related to the `show` command and updated it to use only Bundler methods for its functionality.
dependenciesrubygemsbundlerrubydependency-manager
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