Johannes Schickling is a Berlin-based software engineer who has spent two decades building the tools he wished existed — first for backend developers at Prisma, then for an entire emerging category of local-first software. His career splits cleanly in two: a venture-backed GraphQL infrastructure company he co-founded and led as CEO, and a deliberate second act as an independent builder, podcaster, and conference organizer working at the edge of client-side data. Today he operates under the Overengineering Studio banner, consulting on R&D, devtools, and open-source incubation while his own projects consume most of his time.
From teenage founder to GraphQL pioneer
Schickling's first company was sub2home, a German startup he co-founded and served as CTO in the early 2010s — while, by most accounts, still in his teens. He studied computer science at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, then in 2014 co-founded Optonaut, a smartphone app for stereoscopic 360° VR video he described as "an Instagram for VR." After Optonaut was sold, he joined Entrepreneur First's fifth London cohort in late 2015. With a bucket list of technologies to explore — GraphQL on top — he prototyped a GraphQL backend-as-a-service in a matter of days, reasoning that Parse and Firebase were too rigid where GraphQL made the API layer flexible. A friend he showed it to, Søren Bramer Schmidt, flew to London and became his co-founder.
That prototype became Graphcool, which went live in March 2016: an open-source GraphQL backend combining a flexible permission layer with serverless functions. It caught the GraphQL wave early, raising an angel round that December backed by figures including Heroku's founder, and growing to more than 59,000 users who created 234,000 projects — developers at Twitter, Airbnb, Netlify, and Auth0 among them. But experienced customers kept pushing past what a hosted backend could offer, so the company pivoted: Graphcool's query engine shipped standalone as Prisma 1.0 under Apache 2.0 in January 2018, and that May the company renamed itself Prisma and announced a $4.5 million seed led by Kleiner Perkins — money deliberately raised, Schickling told TechCrunch, from West Coast investors who "really understand open source" and bottom-up developer adoption.
Community as a product discipline
Prisma's rise coincided with ecosystem-building that Schickling treated as core work rather than marketing. His company hosted Europe's first GraphQL conference — GraphQL Europe 2017 drew about 300 people to Berlin, the 2018 edition about 500, and the 2019 rebrand to GraphQL Conf more than 800. He helped push for a TC39-style GraphQL working group, and his team maintained popular open tools including GraphQL Playground and, earlier, Chromeless — headless-Chrome automation released before Puppeteer existed.
He stepped down as CEO in mid-2020 — the record does not say why — remaining a board member while the company raised a $12 million Series A that July and a $40 million Altimeter-led round in 2022, roughly $56.5 million in reported total funding. The Graphcool service itself sunset on July 1, 2020, closing the BaaS chapter as Prisma continued as a pure open-source toolkit.
The local-first turn
In 2020 Schickling went, in his words, "all in on local-first," crediting the Ink & Switch essay and its authors — friendships that would shape everything after. The vehicle was personal: a former DJ, he wanted to recover the feeling of "my music collection" that streaming had dissolved, and began building Overtone, a local-first app unifying Spotify, YouTube, Bandcamp, Dropbox, and personal files behind one high-quality client — a third-party client over wherever music lives, the way Superhuman sits atop Gmail.
The engineering proved harder than the app. Client-side state needed new foundations, so he joined Riffle, a research project on database-driven client state (2021–2023, presented at App.js Conf 2023), and re-implemented Ink & Switch's Cambria lens work as Schemalayer. When Riffle concluded, its ideas carried into LiveStore — an open-source data layer pairing a reactive embedded SQLite database with a git-inspired, event-sourcing sync engine: changes append to an ordered event log, materialize instantly into local state, and rebase onto upstream history before pushing. He chose event sourcing over CRDTs partly out of what he calls migration "trauma" from the Prisma era. LiveStore opened early access in November 2024 — GitHub sponsors and Expo subscribers first — and powers Overtone today.
Effect and the circuit
Alongside the products runs a second career as an ecosystem participant. He does developer-experience work at Effectful Technologies, hosts Cause & Effect — Effect's official podcast on production adoptions at companies like Vercel, Zendesk, and Warp — MC'd Effect Days 2025, and describes Effect as "a standard library that the web never really had": shared primitives for errors, concurrency, and serialization wherever JavaScript runs. Since January 2024 he has hosted localfirst.fm, opening with Ink & Switch's Peter van Hardenberg, and he co-organized Local-First Conf 2024 in Berlin — scaling a 60-person meetup into a two-day conference — with later editions following. Talks at SPLASH, ViteConf, and podcasts from The Changelog to InfoQ trace the same arc.
What the record does not settle
The record is thin where it matters most: no birth date or degree confirmation beyond self-reported profiles; no public explanation for the 2020 CEO transition; disagreement on when Overtone began (2020 per his own telling, 2021 per his site) and when sub2home started. Overtone has no announced release date, and LiveStore's route from preview to general availability — and whatever funds Overengineering Studio — is still open. The seams are preserved rather than smoothed.
This index was compiled from public sources and does not imply the subject's endorsement. Citations live in the packet's source catalog.