
January 1st, 2025, marks an important new chapter in my life: I am officially leaving the adventure Frontastic behind and embarking on new ones. The hardest part for me is saying goodbye to all the amazing co-workers, many of whom have become close friends. But after seven years of an incredible roller-coaster ride, I’m looking forward to taking a year-long break.
When Thomas approached us in 2017 with the idea of founding Frontastic, I never imagined we would successfully sell it and even integrate it into an enterprise as prominent as commercetools. I’m deeply grateful for the opportunity to craft a company culture based on my own values and see it actually thrive. Collaborating on all levels of company strategy, hiring amazing people, and helping them form exceptional teams taught me so much. Perhaps most importantly, I learned that being unapologetically myself can positively influence the environment around me. Beyond Thomas, I want to thank my fellow co-founders (Kore, Henning, and Manuel) for the incredible journey!
Looking back, Frontastic fits perfectly into my career narrative: Back in the ’90s (cough), I started as what was then called a web designer (despite having no actual design skills). Completing an apprenticeship as an IT specialist with a focus on software development at Deutsche Bank helped me sharpen my programming (and teaching) skills and introduced me to the open-source community. Working at Deutsche Bank as a “software architect” (though my current understanding of the term differs greatly) for a year helped me realize two things: a) large enterprise environments weren’t for me, and b) studying computer science was something I needed to pursue.
At TU Dortmund, not only did I complete my computer science studies, but I also met Kore and the other fantastic people at the PHP Usergroup Dortmund. I still count many from this peer group among my closest friends. Shifting away from enterprise employment led me deeper into open source and gave me the chance to work full-time on an open-source software library project, which was both an incredible learning opportunity and thoroughly enjoyable.
This background laid the foundation for Kore, Manuel, and me to start Qafoo, where we helped countless engineering teams across various setups and industries enhance their skills in sustainable software engineering, architecture, and quality. Teaching engineers taught me so much about different types of software, team dynamics, and the art of teaching itself.
Helping Benjamin spawn Tideways from this environment was an exciting side quest in building an organically growing company and applying many past lessons to the trade-offs of long-term software engineering. What better preparation could there be for founding our own start-up?
When Frontastic officially came to life in December 2017, we had already been working on it for almost a year in different forms. But the full story of Frontastic is a tale for another time …
Deciding to close the Frontastic chapter wasn’t an easy decision. However, the relief I’ve felt during this year of rest has already confirmed it was the right choice.
I’m now busy catching up on many neglected responsibilities at home, spending more time with my family, focusing on my mental health, …. The code name for this year is “Project 364” because I have 364 days (starting January 1st) to let myself flow and figure out what comes next on day 365. Currently, I’m channeling my inner sysadmin at home, ensuring my lights are smarter than I am, and optimizing my home automation setup to borderline sci-fi levels. Let’s just say “Project 364” involves a lot of debugging—just without the production downtime. 🤓