Michael Simons

Michael Simons is a Java champion and senior staff software engineer at Neo4j and has been working professionally as a developer for more than 20 years. In his role at Neo4j, he is a vital part of Neo4j’s integration into the broader Java ecosystem.

Before entering the graph space, he worked in the German utility sector, using SQL to compute and predict energy usage for large German transport grid operators and energy producers, way before analytical databases became more mainstream. To this day, he enjoys using the declarative nature of SQL (and, of course, Cypher) to ask machines for answers instead of instructing them to produce a result.

Michael is a known speaker at conferences, bridging Java and databases—relational and graph alike—for many years. Michael is the author of the bestselling book Spring Boot 2 and co-author of arc42 by Example, a book about software architecture documentation. He also writes a blog at info.michael-simons.eu.

In the spare time that is left, Michael still dreams about becoming an amateur athlete, and when he isn’t training for the next marathon, he uses DuckDB to document his progress at biking.michael-simons.eu/history.