Thorsten Frommen
Engineering Manager at Syde GmbH
Erkelenz, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolThorsten Frommen is an Engineering Manager and seasoned WordPress specialist with over a decade of hands-on experience in web development, object-oriented design, and scalable architecture. Currently leading engineering at Syde after progressive principal roles, he combines technical depth with people-first leadership that emphasizes trust, open communication, and continuous mentorship. He has a strong track record delivering enterprise WordPress solutions and improving developer workflows, including backend contributions to the widely used ElasticPress plugin and front-end accessibility work in the Gutenberg project. Comfortable working with remote, multicultural teams, Thorsten also contributes to open-source localization efforts like Flexbox Froggy, reflecting a habit of widening access through translation. A long-time WordCamp attendee and community advocate, he pairs practical engineering rigor with a passion for knowledge sharing and lifelong learning. His background is rooted in RWTH Aachen Computer Science studies and a steady progression from hands-on engineering to strategic technical leadership.
12 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science - MS Computer Science, Master of Science - MS Computer Science at RWTH Aachen University
German, English
Stackoverflow
177reputation
11kreached
3answers
1question
Github Skills (30)
javascript10
back-end-development10
translation10
rman10
amazon-elasticsearch10
plugin-development10
wordpress10
css10
ui-design10
wp-cli10
uid10
elasticsearchquery10
php10
localization10
flexbox10
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
WordPress/gutenberg
Oct 2017 - Jul 2019
The Block Editor project for WordPress and beyond. Plugin is available from the official repository.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Front-end DeveloperContributions:21 commits, 29 PRs, 2 pushes in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Thorsten primarily contributed to the front-end aspects of the Gutenberg editor. They focused on enhancing the user interface by modifying input types, adding and updating ARIA labels for accessibility, and refining the behavior of UI elements like the "Add New" button. Their work also involved addressing rendering issues and fixing the behavior of components like the FormTokenField, demonstrating a focus on improving the overall user experience.
wordpressgutenbergwordpress-plugin
10up/ElasticPress
Sep 2021 - Dec 2021
A fast and flexible search and query engine for WordPress.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:5 commits, 3 PRs, 6 comments in 2 months
Contributions summary:Thorsten primarily contributed to the backend functionality of the ElasticPress WordPress plugin. Their commits involved adding a WP-CLI subcommand for retrieving mappings, integrating comment status transitions, and updating index name retrieval. They also addressed issues related to negative offsets in the post indexing logic and updated the plugin version.
query-enginewordpresselasticsearchsearchwordpress-plugin
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