Kevin Wenger

Senior Backend Developer & Lead Tech

Open source advocate · Drupal & Symfony

About

I'm a backend developer and Lead Tech based in Lausanne, Switzerland. For 12 years I've built and led PHP projects with Symfony and Drupal, and since 2016 I've done it at Antistatique, a Lausanne web agency. I design the architecture, unblock the hard problems (performance, caching, large data volumes, APIs) and coach teams on code quality. About 10% of my time goes to open source.

What I do

  • Architecture of monolithic and decoupled Symfony and Drupal projects
  • Performance and caching: Varnish, Elasticsearch, Core Web Vitals
  • Technical leadership, code review and coaching of PHP teams
  • Technical scoping and estimates before a project starts

Selected work

  • Lausanne Hockey Club: Varnish cache strategy handling 135,000 sessions/hour at a 15 ms response time, and real-time push notifications for 150,000 subscribers.
  • Switzerland Sotheby's International Realty: property search and interactive map across millions of listings, plus the worldwide sync of millions of properties through Symfony Messenger and a queue system. 2nd place at the Splash Awards 2023.
  • SmarTer: hundreds of correlated measurements and hectare-level geodata across all of Switzerland, in a decoupled Symfony architecture. Heavy data processing runs in the background through Messenger, queues and workers, so the app stays fast while the data behind it keeps updating.
  • Respawwwn: real-time multiplayer gaming built on Mercure, and a panorama tile system that cuts load times for large 360° images.
  • Watchdreamer: Elasticsearch e-commerce with 60+ facet filters and over 15,000 customers. 2nd place at the Splash Awards 2019.
  • Fédération romande des consommateurs: I'm very proud of the performance work and the metrics: mobile LCP down 54%, page weight down 79%, plus a RAG-based legal answers engine.

Open source, writing & community

I contribute to Drupal core and maintain modules such as Bamboo Twig (3,500+ installs), PHP libraries, and tools like Capdrupal (50,000+ downloads). I write about Symfony and PHP on Medium, speak at meetups, teach at HEIG-VD, and co-founded and run the Webmardi association.

Contact

Get in touch: contact@kevin-wenger.ch