// ABOUT

Johannes Wachter

Hello, I am Johannes Wachter. I am a core developer of Sulu, the open-source Symfony CMS, and I have worked on it since the project’s early days, mostly on the backend. I am based in Vorarlberg, Austria, and have been building with Symfony since around 2012.

These days most of my energy goes into where software engineering meets AI. I started Symfony Mate, which gives AI coding assistants real runtime context from a running app, and Modelflow-AI, a provider-agnostic PHP interface for AI models. In August 2026 I joined the symfony/ai Core Team (see my note on that), teach as an external lecturer at FH Vorarlberg, and write about what building open source actually teaches me, and what we can all learn from it.

Away from the keyboard, I share my life with the three greatest girls I know, two of them my daughters. They keep everything else in perspective.

Location
Vorarlberg, Austria
E-mail
johannes@sulu.io
Sulu Developer
since August, 2013
Symfony AI Core Team
since August, 2026
Johannes Wachter
// HOW THIS IS WRITTEN

I draft these articles with an AI assistant, the same kind of tooling I write about, then edit and cut until it says what I actually mean. The experiences and the opinions are mine. I do not ship a sentence I would not defend in a code review.

// SKILLS
PHP Symfony Sulu JavaScript Elasticsearch LLM / RAG MCP Scrum

Also works with C, C++, Java and C#.

// WORK EXPERIENCE
August, 2026 – until now
Symfony
Symfony AI Core Team

Invited by Christopher Hertel to help shape the direction of symfony/ai, alongside Fabien Potencier, Christopher Hertel and Oskar Stark.

August, 2018 – until now
Sulu GmbH
Sulu Core Developer

Core development, architecture, support and conception for Sulu and its third-party bundles. I own sulu.ai, the AI platform behind Sulu’s editorial tooling, and build most of it myself.

October, 2020 – until now
Vorarlberg University of Applied Science
External Lecturer

Seminars, courses and project coaching, including Script and Web Technologies and the Innovation Project.

August, 2013 – September, 2018
MASSIVE ART WebServices GmbH
Sulu Core Developer

Conception and development of Sulu and its third-party bundles, with consulting, part-time alongside my studies at first.

June, 2010 – September, 2010
Liebherr Elektronik GmbH
Test Software Developer

Extended the project I began for my thesis at HTL Rankweil.

// SPEAKING
2026
2026
Symfony Mate: Real Runtime Context for AI Coding Assistants SymfonyLive Berlin · SymfonyOnline
2026
RAG beyond hello world VLBG Webdev
2025
CMS Panel Discussion SyliusCon · With Filippo Maria Tasca, Jacques Bodin-Hullin, Mikołaj Król and Magdalena Sadowska
2025
Sulu CMS 3.0 & AI: Live-Integration Never Code Alone · With Roland Golla
2024
Flexibility in the Face of Uncertainty SymfonyCon Vienna · Provider-agnostic, GDPR-aware AI in Symfony
2017
Tired of fixing your CMS instead of creating awesome websites? SymfonyCon Cluj · Sulu
// EDUCATION
2005 – 2009
Höhere Lehranstalt für Elektronik und Technische Informatik · HTL Rankweil
2010 – 2013
Software and Information Engineering · University of Applied Sciences Dornbirn
2013 – 2015
Master of Science in Engineering · University of Applied Sciences Dornbirn
2017
Elasticsearch Core Developer · Elastic