Ben Thomson
Director at Frostbyte Foundation Inc.
Perth, Western Australia
Summary
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RockstarBen Thomson is a pragmatic engineering director and business systems manager with a decade of experience building and maintaining PHP/Laravel-based CMS platforms and web applications from Perth, Australia. As a long-time maintainer of Winter CMS and contributor to OctoberCMS, he blends hands-on back-end development—fixing security edge cases, improving file handling and form widgets—with product-minded system management at Manage It. He has led teams and projects since early-career roles through directorship at Frostbyte Foundation, pairing technical depth with operational leadership. Known on GitHub as a “basher of keyboards,” he brings a practical, detail-oriented approach to legacy maintenance, CI migrations, and hardening auth flows—work that often prevents subtle production incidents.
10 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
Github Skills (25)
application-framework10
cms10
github-ci10
back-end-development10
laravel-mix10
app-framework10
configuration-management10
user-authentication10
authentication10
laravel10
phpunit10
security10
php10
web-framework10
backend10
Programming languages (12)
Github contributions (5)
wintercms/winter
Aug 2020 - Jan 2023
Free, open-source, self-hosted CMS platform based on the Laravel PHP Framework.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:40 releases, 211 reviews, 408 commits in 2 years 5 months
Contributions summary:Ben focused on enhancing the functionality and security of the Winter CMS platform. Their contributions included implementing a `trustedHosts` configuration for password reset flows to mitigate host header poisoning attacks, which involved modifications to the application configuration file and the authentication controller. They also merged changes from the 'develop' branch and incorporated localization updates, demonstrating involvement in code maintenance and platform updates.
cmslaravelphp-frameworkwintercms-platform
octobercms/library
Jan 2019 - Mar 2021
October Rain Library
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:37 reviews, 89 commits, 102 PRs in 2 years 1 month
Contributions summary:Ben contributed to the October CMS library by implementing features and fixing bugs. Their work involved adding a function equivalent to `get_class_methods()` for extendable classes and converting array-notated fields to dot notation for validation, affecting multiple source files. They also improved .gif resizing and fixed issues related to the `CURLOPT` constants and database file name handling.
rainoctober
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