Hard problems.
Boring interfaces.
I lead a software engineering team at Vector Informatik and write developer tooling in Rust in the evenings. Most of it is build systems, reproducibility and distribution: complicated underneath, and deliberately dull to use. Thirteen years of that, starting in IT security and cryptography.
| No. | Property | Value | Remark |
|---|---|---|---|
| 01 | Shipping software since | 2013 | GTS Systems & Consulting → Vector Informatik |
| 02 | Engineers in the team I lead | 12 | Vector Informatik, since June 2025 |
| 03 | Time to a working dev environment | < 1 h | Dev containers, company-wide. It used to be days |
| 04 | Years a build must still reproduce | 30 | Escrow rebuilds, fully offline, no network at all |
| 05 | Coding agents one declaration reaches | 10 | Grimoire writes each client its own config format |
| 06 | Package managers written in Rust | 2 | grimoire.rs and ocx.sh, both Apache-2.0 |
Last revised .
Grimoire
A package manager for AI-agent configuration. Teams package the practices that work — skills, rules, agents, MCP servers — and every colleague gets them in whichever coding agent they already use, pinned by digest and reviewed before it lands.
OCX
A package manager for pre-built binaries distributed over OCI registries — install a toolchain with one command, switch versions instantly, and run builds in a clean, reproducible environment.
L1 Blockchain Engineering
CryptoNote forks were each rebuilding the same improvements in isolation. Galaxia consolidated them into reusable libraries and a config-driven node — 200+ nodes on the main chain, and components adopted by other chains.
Microsoft's C++ Standard Library Contribution
Two of three pull requests merged into Microsoft's C++ standard library: a bug fix, and a build change that untangled a circular binary dependency on boost and dropped the package-manager requirement.
Privacy–Preserving Data Discovery in Distributed Health Networks with Dynamic Consent
A distributed health-data network that answers queries by aggregating results instead of data, so records never leave the institution. Scales to hundreds of sites and ten million records in thirty seconds.
WMS Data Extraction
A valuation firm was copying ground-zone data out of a WMS service by hand in Qgis. I mapped the process to an automated pipeline: months of work became about a day, with fewer errors and room for more sources.
Languages
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Ways of working
Senior Manager Software Development at Vector Informatik, since June 2025.
Mail is best
contact@michael-herwig.de — I read everything and answer most things within a day or two.