Hi I'm Max,

I'm a long-time Open Source Enthusiast, highly invested in making the Internet a better place, allowing people to participate in the online world and empowering them to build and operate infrastructure on their own. I really like networks and automation (and coding) as well as giving talks and workshops about it.😊

My First Network and public speaking

I'm the founder of the FrOSCon Network Track / myfirst.network which is designed for a broad audience of interested Linux folks, system administrators and developers to steady networking basics and introduce advanced topics in a comprehensible and hands-on manner. As the lines between system operations and network engineering keep on blurring this seems to be an important topic to me. Besides the FrOSCon Network Track I'm a public speaker in the Open Source and networking scene and try to share insights and ideas on projects I'm working on and what can be done with Open Source tools.

Freifunk and Open Source Projects

Since 2014 I'm the lead architect of Freifunk Hochstift and working on open, reliable, scalable and automated infrastructure to provide open network access for everyone in my area. This work is intended to aid as a stepping stone for other communities and has proved to be one. In the process of building the Freifunk Hochstift infrastructure automation I contributed a lot to other Open Source software suites like CumulusNetworks ifupdown2, LibreNMS, OpenVPN, anycast-healthchecker and developed some Icinga2 checks as well as Scripts for netbox and contributed to the Netbox DeviceTypes library.

Since I joined the Network Services Association I became a Co-author of ifupdown-ng a new approach to configure networking on Linux system which aims to be fully compatible with Alpine/Debians ifupdown as well as CumulusNetworks ifupdown2. Besides that I'm a Co-Founder and developer of the bio-routing project intended to become a scalable and versatil routing suite supporting BGP, IS-IS as well as OSPF.

I spend a lot of my free time on all of these - and other - projects and try to have an impact.

VirtualNOG

While the Corona pandemic hit a fellow networker started the virtualnog.net meetings where I quickly became a Co-host and am looking for new topics and presenters and am handling the recordings ever since.

What Sponsorship Does

Your sponsorship enables me to spend more time pursuing my passion and helps me continue to contribute. It helps offset the costs of getting to conferences, pay for hosting, and other promotional expenses associated with my projects.

I plan to give increased priority to issues created/upvoted by sponsors, with greater weight given to higher tiers.