Michael Simons
Senior Staff Software Engineer at Neo4j
Aachen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Summary
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Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMichael Simons is a Senior Staff Software Engineer with 15+ years of experience, currently shaping Neo4j's Java ecosystem from Aachen, Germany. A recognized Java Champion and bestselling author of a German Spring Boot book, he bridges deep backend expertise in Spring, Neo4j and Quarkus with practical improvements to drivers, OGM and developer tooling. His open-source contributions include notable work on spring-data-neo4j, the Neo4j Java driver, Spring Boot and Quarkus extensions—adding features, hardening tests, and improving compatibility across classloaders and containers. Colleagues know him for pragmatic refactors that prevent subtle runtime and transaction issues, and for migrating and modernizing test suites to robust Java-based integrations. Outside work he balances curiosity-driven experimentation with family life and cycling, a mindset that surfaces in his willingness to try new approaches and "break things" to build better systems.
15 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Technomathematik, Technomathematik at FH Aachen University of Applied Sciences
English, German
Stackoverflow
4,715reputation
985kreached
85answers
2questions
rest
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neo4j
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spring-boot
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logging
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spring
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java
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Github Skills (65)
annotations10
testing10
databases10
spring-security10
graph-database10
javas10
device-driver10
rest-api10
cloud-native10
app-framework10
bolt10
neo4j10
database10
application-framework10
json10
Programming languages (26)
Github contributions (5)
neo4j/neo4j-ogm
Jul 2018 - Dec 2022
Java Object-Graph Mapping Library for Neo4j
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:70 releases, 19 reviews, 808 commits in 4 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Michael contributed significantly to the `neo4j/neo4j-ogm` repository, focusing on the enhancement and maintenance of the Java Object-Graph Mapping library for Neo4j. Their work included improvements to core functionalities, such as documentation for type conversion, adding case-insensitive comparisons, and fixes related to handling of dynamic properties and relationships. Furthermore, the user addressed a critical issue in the HTTP driver by handling non-JSON responses gracefully, ensuring robust exception handling.
object-graphogmgraph-databasesnosql-databasesneo4j-ogm
neo4j-examples/movies-java-spring-data-neo4j
Aug 2018 - Oct 2020
Neo4j Movies Example with Spring Data Neo4j
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:15 commits, 6 PRs, 20 pushes in 2 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Michael primarily focused on maintaining and upgrading the Neo4j Movies Example with Spring Data Neo4j. Their contributions involved fixing site functionality by reintroducing Spring Data Rest, refactoring controller methods, and updating HTML to use correct URLs. They also performed housekeeping tasks, including bumping project dependencies and removing unnecessary code, along with ensuring the project started and worked correctly with newer versions of Spring Boot and Spring Data Neo4j. Furthermore, the user upgraded the project to Spring Data Neo4j 6 and made necessary configuration updates.
neo4j-databasespring-datamoviesspringspring-data-neo4j
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