Michael Wallner

Michael Wallner is an Austrian software founder and web application engineer based in Vienna. He founded Coder’s Cantina, co-founded the Salzburg digital agency Neonblack, and created b10cks, an open-source headless content-management system. His career has combined software architecture, full-stack development, technical leadership, e-commerce, cloud infrastructure, open-source products, and the operation of high-traffic international event platforms.

Michael is also known for his long involvement with the Wings for Life World Run. Between 2013 and 2025, he worked on the event’s website and registration platform, participant and spectator experiences, local event-management tools, streaming integrations, information systems, DevOps, and live technical support.[1] The wider registration environment supported more than 300,000 annual sign-ups across more than 200 countries.

Since 2025, his work has centered on Coder’s Cantina and a group of open-source products built with technologies including Laravel, Vue.js, TypeScript, Rust, and Tauri. Alongside developing software directly, he created the Werkstatt engagement model to establish production foundations, AI-assisted engineering workflows, and practical handover processes that enable client teams to continue building independently.

Early life and education

Michael was born on 10 July 1983 in Hallein, Austria. He began professional work in design and technology in 1998, several years before entering university. This early experience placed him in an environment where visual communication, websites, databases, internal systems, and physical products intersected.

From 2002 to 2012, he studied computer science at the University of Salzburg. His studies covered applied computer science, software engineering, databases, and project management, culminating in a master’s degree completed with honors.[1] His master’s thesis addressed a heterogeneous enterprise-resource-planning landscape, connecting his academic work with problems encountered in an industrial setting.

In October 2025, Michael began a theology course scheduled to continue through June 2027. He has pursued that course alongside his software company, product development, and community work.

Early career

Kässbohrer Transport Technik

Michael’s professional career began at Kässbohrer Transport Technik in 1998. He remained with the company until 2009, working through internships and part-time roles while completing his university studies. His position combined graphic design and software development rather than following a narrowly defined engineering track.

His visual responsibilities included product logos, printed materials, image brochures, trade-fair preparation, image retouching, and product photography focused on vehicle-transport equipment. On the technical side, he implemented and repeatedly modernized the corporate website, moving from static HTML to a custom content-management system and later to TYPO3. He also developed interfaces and internal applications and worked with web servers, databases, content-management systems, and broader IT projects.

This period established several themes that continued throughout his career: the integration of design with engineering, the modernization of existing systems, and the translation of operational requirements into software. It also provided the business context for his master’s research into heterogeneous ERP systems.

pixelart

In 2009, Michael joined pixelart as Head of Development. There he led a development team producing tailored websites and interactive digital experiences. The agency’s projects drew on technologies including TYPO3 and Flash, as well as custom integrations with product-information-management systems.

His responsibilities extended beyond implementation. He introduced and refined development workflows, encouraged the adoption of new technologies, led internal knowledge-transfer initiatives, and developed DevOps practices intended to improve collaboration and deployment. The role placed him at the intersection of engineering management, technical architecture, and hands-on delivery.

Michael remained at pixelart until early 2013. By the end of that period, his work had moved from implementing individual websites toward directing teams and designing the technical processes through which applications were built and operated.

badSOFT

In 2013, Michael entered self-employment through badSOFT. The business concentrated on web applications and feature-rich websites, initially drawing heavily on TYPO3 while also incorporating payment systems and newer application frameworks.

During this period, he expanded his use of Laravel and Vue.js. These technologies later became central to his work at Neonblack, Coder’s Cantina, and b10cks. The move into self-employment also began a sustained entrepreneurial phase in which he combined client delivery with the development of reusable technical methods and products.

Wings for Life World Run

Michael began working on the Wings for Life World Run in 2013, before the first edition of the international race. He continued in the role through 2025.[1] The event brings participants together at the same time in different locations and directs entry fees and donations toward spinal-cord research.

His work covered a group of connected digital systems rather than a single website. He led development and improvement work for the Live Experience used by runners and spectators, the public website and online registration system, the App Run Event Manager, Twitch live-streaming integrations, and operational information systems.[1]

The assignment required both planned product development and direct event operations. Michael worked on system design, feature implementation, coding, infrastructure, and DevOps, then provided live support during the event itself. This combination made reliability under a fixed global deadline a central technical requirement: unlike an ordinary web application, event systems had to perform during synchronized periods of intense participant and spectator activity.

The registration platform operated at international scale, with more than 300,000 annual registrations across more than 200 countries. Supporting that environment required attention to localization, payment processing, deployment, monitoring, operational information, and the coordination of participant-facing and internal systems.

Michael’s final year on the project was 2025. By then, his involvement had spanned the event’s development from its formative period through more than a decade of global operation. The experience became an important basis for his later emphasis on durable application foundations, observability, deployment practices, and technical systems capable of functioning under predictable but unusually concentrated loads.

Neonblack

In October 2015, Michael co-founded Neonblack, a digital agency based in the Salzburg area. He served as co-founder, developer, and technical lead until May 2025. The agency created custom websites, digital brand experiences, e-commerce platforms, and complex web applications for startups and international companies.

Michael led the agency’s technology work. Its principal application stack included Laravel, Nuxt, and Vue.js, with hosting and infrastructure on Amazon Web Services. He supervised both internal developers and external technical partners while remaining involved in architecture and implementation.

E-commerce became a significant part of Neonblack’s work. Projects involved more than 30 payment providers across different markets, requiring the agency to reconcile distinct checkout processes, APIs, currencies, and operating requirements. Michael’s responsibilities included the reliability and security of these integrations as well as their place within the wider customer experience.

Neonblack also represented a continuation of his earlier interest in combining design and software. Its stated focus was not only application functionality but the creation of coherent digital brand and commerce experiences. As technical lead, Michael worked with designers, content specialists, developers, and client teams to turn those experiences into maintainable applications.

He concluded his role at Neonblack in May 2025, after nearly a decade. The transition coincided with the establishment of Coder’s Cantina as his primary company and with the beginning of public development around b10cks.

Coder’s Cantina

Michael founded Coder’s Cantina in Vienna and began operating under the company as his principal professional vehicle in May 2025. He serves as founder and full-stack developer. The company combines custom web-application development, technical consulting, open-source product engineering, cloud architecture, and AI-assisted development workflows.

Coder’s Cantina builds applications principally with Laravel, Vue.js, Nuxt, and TypeScript, supported by cloud infrastructure and automated deployment systems. Michael’s earlier experience with global registration, international payments, and high-traffic event systems informs the company’s focus on data models, permissions, deployment, observability, and maintainability.

The company also reflects a shift in his practice from delivering a completed system to establishing an environment in which another team can continue working. This approach is formalized in an offering called Die Werkstatt, or the workshop.

Die Werkstatt

Die Werkstatt is a phased software-development and training engagement. Michael begins by creating the technical foundation of an application: its domain and data model, service boundaries, authentication, permissions, environments, continuous-integration pipeline, deployment process, logging, and observability.

The second phase produces a complete feature from interface to database, permission check, automated test, and deployed screen. This feature becomes the reference pattern for later work. It is intended both for human developers and for software agents, whose output can be made more consistent when a project contains a strong implementation to imitate.

The third phase establishes an AI-assisted development workflow. It can include agent instruction files, contextual documentation, integrations that expose relevant systems to models, separate planning and review roles, specification-driven development loops, automated evaluations, guardrails, regression tests, and human approval gates. Multi-step processes can be represented through explicit loops or state graphs with retry, escalation, and termination conditions.

The final phase centers on handover and enablement. Client personnel work in the repository from the beginning and receive architecture notes, runbooks, seeded development environments, practical training, and an operable deployment pipeline. A complete engagement typically lasts two to three months, although the AI-workflow phase can be applied separately to an existing codebase.

The model expresses Michael’s view that generative tools have reduced the cost of producing code without removing the need for architecture, judgment, correctness, and operational discipline. The intended result is a production application, a repeatable feature pattern, a controlled development workflow, and a team able to continue without a permanent dependency on its original developer.

b10cks

Michael started b10cks in April 2025.[1] The product is an open-source headless content-management system created in response to pricing models that reserve localization, version history, collaboration, or visual editing for more expensive service tiers.

As a headless CMS, b10cks separates structured content from its presentation. Websites, applications, and other channels retrieve content through APIs rather than being coupled to a single rendering system. Content is assembled from reusable modular blocks that can be combined and nested to form different structures.

The system includes a visual content editor and an infinite canvas for planning content structures. Real-time multiplayer collaboration allows team members to work together, while two-way binding is intended to show editorial changes in their rendered context. Localization operates at field level and supports inheritance across content structures.

Its version-control model draws on software-development workflows. Content changes can be tracked through history, branches, tags, releases, scheduling, and rollback. The hosted platform also provides content delivery, image processing, integrations, APIs, and webhooks.

The complete codebase is released under the GNU AGPLv3 license and can be self-hosted. The commercial service does not charge according to the number of editors or localizations and makes its feature set available across plans. Hosted users instead pay primarily for storage and traffic. Michael reported annual recurring revenue of €3,000 for the product.

b10cks uses Laravel and Vue.js, with TypeScript and related web technologies. Michael also created a separate b10cks SDK project containing client libraries and integrations. The CMS became Coder’s Cantina’s principal product and the clearest expression of the company’s open-source and user-ownership approach.

Other software projects

Coder’s Cantina serves as the umbrella for several products beyond b10cks. These projects extend Michael’s work from web applications into native desktop software, command-line tools, interface components, and reusable libraries.

RAVN Mail is a cross-platform email client built with Tauri, Rust, and TypeScript. It organizes email through a kanban-style inbox and incorporates AI-oriented integrations intended for developers and knowledge workers. A related project, turndown, is an opinionated Rust port of Turndown.js adapted for converting and processing email content.

Kessel is a native remote-file manager for remote filesystems. Conceived as a modern alternative to traditional FTP and SFTP clients, it is written in Rust and uses Apache OpenDAL. gh0st is a command-line web crawler and search-engine-optimization analysis tool, also written in Rust, with performance and terminal-based use as its principal design concerns.

SabaccUI is a collection of more than 50 production-oriented interface components with TypeScript support, accessibility provisions, and customization controls. The related Laravel Boilerplate provides an application starting point with authentication, API architecture, and deployment workflows. Coder’s Cantina has also described dayflow, an AI-assisted time-blocking product intended to adapt planning to individual work patterns, as a future project.

Together, these projects document Michael’s movement from agency and client work toward building reusable, publicly inspectable software. They also function as working examples of the development workflow offered through Die Werkstatt.

Technical practice

Michael’s principal web-development technologies include PHP, Laravel, Vue.js, Nuxt, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, MySQL, and Amazon Web Services. His infrastructure work covers DevOps, continuous integration and delivery, deployment automation, observability, and scalable application architecture. He has substantial experience with content-management systems, online registration, e-commerce, product-information systems, and payment integrations.

His more recent software work increasingly uses Rust, Tauri, and native desktop or command-line interfaces. Projects such as RAVN Mail, Kessel, gh0st, and turndown reflect this expansion while retaining his earlier emphasis on practical tools, open-source distribution, and direct control over software and data.

Michael speaks German and English. German is his native language, while he uses English at full professional proficiency.[1] He lives and works in Vienna and maintains professional connections with Salzburg, where he studied and spent much of his earlier career.