Simon Mittag
I'm a software engineer
open-source contributor, startup CTO and German expat in Sydney.
Hi, my name is
Startups
I was fortunate to spend time in BCG's start-up incubator in Sydney, Singapore and Mountain View, where I met a
host of amazing people from all walks of life. This lead to the creation of several successful companies.
I've been involved as CTO and advisor in Australian startups since.
WeMoney is a financial wellness platform, focused on improving financial literacy amongst Millenial Australians. Since its initial release, the app has quickly grown to 200,000+ active users and provides a supportive environment for those in financial hardship.
I joined WeMoney as its first CTO and was responsible for the product and technology roadmap, an engineering team of 8 FTE and the delivery of the WeMoney app. We converted the production API to run on j8a, which now provides a secure access point for all traffic from the react-native app. The project grew significantly over the next year and adopted new contributors, with WeMoney becoming a sponsor. At the same time, our live traffic doubled and the platform received it’s first security certification.
In July 2022, WeMoney released password-less connections to aggregate financial data for 10 Australian banks, with more on the way.
Sypht is an API product that offers intelligent scanning and data extraction from documents. The company is a pioneer in the AI SAAS space, and we processed millions of invoices for MYOB Australia in the first year of operation.
I was a founding member of the Sypht team and was heavily involved in the feature engineering of its first supervised learning model. We went on to build a platform based on Python, Kubernetes and REDIS to do this at industrial scale and reduced processing time from ~30s to 2s per document through a process of continuous optimisation.
After a successful funding round led by BPAY and BCG, I joined the company full-time as CTO, hired a data science and engineering team in Sydney and grew the platform from the initial prototype to the first large production customer.
Boost was launched as a digital wallet in 2017 by BCG and Axiata Digital. The app was designed as a Telco grade service from the start and built to support millions of users. You don’t often get to see this on a start-up and our AWS bill was one to match.
I was a founding member of the Boost team, working on it’s core payments service based on MongoDB that supports up to 10,000 tps, and also spend time on it’s API security layer. My proudest moment was to hit the submit button on the initial Android app release to Google Play store in December 2016.
Since its release, Boost has become a visible presence in Malaysia. The business now employs 600 people and has significantly contributed to financial inclusion in Malaysia, empowering individuals who previously had limited access to banking services.
Co-founded between the Lippo Group and BCG, Ovo started it’s life as a loyalty app, It now provides mobile payments and has enjoyed incredible success, becoming a super-app and dominant player Indonesia’s digital payments landscape. In October 2019 it became Indonesia’s fifth unicorn.
I was part of the founding BCG team that started Ovo in 2015, then a mere idea scribbled on a napkin by Mike Schwartz and John Riady. We worked out of it’s (heavily under construction) Jakarta headquarters and I do remember the building literally being on fire one day.
I went on spending 9 months in Jakarta, integrating the app with Lippo’s existing core banking system (Bank Nobu), working on the initial API for the Android team, and one day demoing everything to an actual billionaire.
Personal Projects
I'm the author of several Linux and Darwin based commandline utilities. Since 2020, I focus on the development
of J8a, and since March 2023 on it's integration into Kubernetes with a custom ingress controller.
cli
performance
http
tls
speedtest
p0d
p0d is a cli based speed and HTTP performance testing tool for Linux and Darwin operating systems.
It’s designed to record sufficient system telemetry data during execution to give performance test
results meaningful context.
cli
apm
lsof
ps
netstat
performance
testing
l0la
l0la is a simple cli utility that combines the output of lsof, ps and netstat to continuously monitor cpu, threads, files, network connections of your process for debugging purposes.
chaos monkey
ci/cd
http
tls
testing
mse6
mse6 is designed to test the resilience of your http client. It’s a mock HTTP/TLS server that responds with
abnormal behaviour such as slow HTTP responses, bad content encoding, sudden crashes, network termination
that are otherwise difficult to consistently reproduce under test conditions.
continuous-integration
liveness-probe
readyness-probe
network
server
socket
port
pwt
pwt (“port wait”) is a commandline utility that blocks until a tcp socket, aka port becomes available.
It is designed to replace the bash sleep command in your CI/CD scripts.
idna
emoji
dns
bash
rfc-1035
rfc-5890
punycode
punycoder
punycoder converts international domain names to their (RFC1035 compatible) punycode representations on the
commandline, so you can use them with nslookup or dig.
Mentions
I do sometimes present at user groups or technology conferences. You can find links to published articles and slides below.
About Me
I’ve been programming since childhood, and spent most of my professional life writing code. Everything started on a Commodore 64 with BASIC and whatever little assembly I could figure out by myself. Over time, I’ve had to pick up many different languages including C, Cobol, RPG, Java, C#, Javascript, Python, Swift, and fast forward to 2020, Golang.
I have an interest in software telemetry data, quality metrics, measuring team performance and worked on a tool that visualizes contributions to github projects (unfortunately not currently available open source).
More recently, I worked on high traffic APIs and and micro-service architecture using kubernetes. With what I learned about inter-service communication, load balancing, session timeouts, HTTP and networks, my current pet project was born.
Get In Touch
Have we met professionally, maybe while visiting a conference or working together on a project? If you want to
reconnect, or alternatively if you are interested in becoming a committer on Github, I would like to hear from you.