Dr. Simon Harrer
Co-Founder & CEO, Entropy Data
Gerolzhofen, Germany
Product engineer at heart who loves to create together with curious minds.
Currently: building agentic data governance at Entropy Data.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Dr. Simon Harrer?
Dr. Simon Harrer is Co-Founder and CEO of Entropy Data, where he builds agentic data governance. He is the author of Java by Comparison, co-author of Remote Mob Programming and GitOps, and the German translator of Zhamak Dehghani's Data Mesh. He holds a PhD in computer science from the University of Bamberg and is based in Gerolzhofen, Germany.
What does Entropy Data do?
Entropy Data builds agentic data governance — software that uses AI agents to help organizations manage data contracts, data products, and data quality. Simon Harrer co-founded the company and serves as its CEO.
What books has Simon Harrer written?
He wrote Java by Comparison (Pragmatic Bookshelf, 2018), co-authored Remote Mob Programming (2020) and GitOps (2021), translated Zhamak Dehghani's Data Mesh into German (2023), and contributed a chapter on data contracts to Effektive Softwarearchitekturen (2024). His PhD thesis on process engine evaluation was published by University of Bamberg Press in 2017. See the books page for details.
What is Java by Comparison?
Java by Comparison is a book by Simon Harrer, Jörg Lenhard, and Linus Dietz that teaches developers to write cleaner, more idiomatic Java through 70 before-and-after code comparisons. It was published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf in 2018.
What open-source tools does Simon Harrer maintain?
He maintains the Data Contract CLI, a Python tool for validating, testing, and exporting data contracts, and the Data Contract Editor, a web-based editor for ODCS data contracts. He also co-created mob.sh, a command-line tool for remote mob programming. See the open source page for more.