I’m Michael Kohl from Austria and this is my personal blog. I currently live in Bangkok (Thailand), where I work as a senior Ruby on Rails developer for Oozou. I also have work experience in systems engineering, devops, security auditing, and technical journalism. For more detailed information about my working life please consult my LinkedIn or StackOverflow Careers profiles or have a look at my projects as well as talks and publications.

I really love traveling and try to do it as often as possible. So far this has brought me to the following places:

Sometimes I like places so much that I end up living there, which so far has happened in in Shanghai (China, 1 year), Istanbul (Turkey, 3 month), Kathmandu (Nepal, 3 month) and Milan (Italy, 10 month).

I’m an avid CouchSurfer, and regularly contribute to Wikivoyage and Trip Advisor.

This leads us directly to another hobby of mine, natural languages. My native language is German and I learned English and Italian in school. After that I went on to study Mandarin Chinese at university, although I’m not as good at it as I should be. I’m a big fan of Spanish and spending several month in Latin America was a big boost for my skills. Nowadays most of my language learning time is spent on Thai, a language I thoroughly enjoy. Except for the languages already mentioned I also dabbled in Turkish (2 month course in Istanbul), Nepali (2 weeks course in Kathmandu), Swedish, Indonesian and Esperanto.