People
Meet the Team...
Olly Willans
Creative Director
Olly is a Founder Director and the Creative Director at Torchbox. His job is to help our clients achieve fantastic things online. He leads the design, digital strategy, user experience, and information architecture at Torchbox. He likes camping, mountains and herding sheep, but has recently been spending his time renovating a house in the flattest part of Oxfordshire. Olly is married to Firoozeh and has three children, Savannah, Jasmine and Sacha (a boy). He is the worst sort of Manchester United supporter. Olly is a Non-Executive Director of the charity Valid Nutrition.
Tom Dyson
Technical Director
Tom graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1995, swapping the later philosophy of Wittgenstein for Netscape 2 and a 9600 baud modem. He started Torchbox with Olly in 2000; since then he has been responsible for the technical direction of all our major developments. Tom's interests include natural language processing, Python, carbon measurement, CouchDB, mini web servers and Jabber. He composed the theme tune to Charlie and Lola.
Ian Bellchambers
Business Development Director
Ian oversees our sales and marketing activities and ensures a seamless transition for new clients from the cut and thrust of competitive tendering to the serious business of actually getting some work done. An enthusiast for most things beginning with the word "open" and an inveterate collector of market intelligence and internet news, there's little that Ian doesn't have an opinion on and what's left is almost certainly not worth bothering with.
James Webster
Technical Operations Director
James joined Torchbox early in 2008 after almost nine years with Amazon.co.uk as a senior software development manger. James fulfills a dual role; masterminding internal production, and acting as a technical consultant on large projects. James brings his experience of building scalable software, large scale system integration, and managing high performing teams. He is a big fan of the Scrum development methodology and Agile development in general.
Nick Burch
Senior Developer
Nick has been working for Torchbox since graduating with a first from Magdalen College, Oxford. He is heavily involed in open source and open data, and is a Vice President and a Member of the Apache Software Foundation. Nick's agile, test-driven approach delivers consistent, scalable code. Nick is also a senior systems administrator, overseeing many of our production machines; his drive for scripting, monitoring and automation has delivered increased uptime while requiring fewer resources.
Victoria Chan
Developer
Victoria is a twittering, blogging, flickring, brompton riding, dim sum loving, mac convert developer from Singapore, who has been critically involved in many of Torchbox's best projects over the last few years.
Helen Chapman
Project Manager
Helen studied English at Keble College Oxford, but discovered her inner geek via a postgraduate course in Cartography at Oxford Brookes University. Before joining Torchbox in 2004 she worked variously as a cartographer, a web developer and a programmer on a European Space Agency project. Her role covers development and project management; clients she has managed new sites for include WWF and Rethink. In her spare time she likes singing in choirs, planting organic vegetables, reading novels and devouring cryptic crosswords.
Garrett Coakley
Developer
Garrett has well over a decade's experience in developing web sites. Past clients range from national high street retailers and financial institutions to international charities and NGOs. His specialisms include Drupal development and community building. Garrett spent four years as an administrative member of the evolt.org web collective and is currently an administrator of the Oxford Flickr group. A keen amateur photographer and guitarist he stands 5' 9" in his socks and has a curious affinity for Guinness.
Dave Cranwell
Developer
Dave is part of the Fast Track Projects development team and is a RationalMedia Architect. Since joining Torchbox in 2001, Dave has gained a comprehensive knowledge of charity sector standards and requirements, particularly semantic markup, accessibility and the need for community building systems for outreach and support. Dave is a Coldfusion and PHP developer and is Torchbox's CSS Tzar. He is a keen designer and multimedia aficionado to boot.
Sally Edgington
Project Manager
Sally joined Torchbox in 2002 and has worked as a Project Manager for clients including NDCS, Battersea Dogs and Cats Home and Breakthrough. Sally is currently a member of our special Small Projects team, delivering a rapid turnaround for clients in a hurry. Sally has also made a number of positive life changes during her time with Torchbox, include getting married, starting a family and studying for the NCT Ante Natal Teaching Diploma. Growing her own organic vegetables in an allotment is the next challenge.
Ben Enright
Designer
Ben has been at Torchbox since 2004. He is handy with Photoshop and has produced appealing designs for the likes of Asthma UK, Breakthrough Breast Cancer and Blackstone Chambers. To relax Ben enjoys cooking (especially outdoors). He likes chillies, cardamoms and flowery ales. He hates Werthers Originals. He also loves sandwiches and struggles to put them down.
Andrew Godwin
Developer
Andrew is currently taking a Computer Science degree at Oxford University, and works for Torchbox in those gaps between lecture courses some people call 'holidays'. At heart a Python and Django developer, he also enjoys taunting browsers with varying levels of javascript trickery, having fun with the CSS box model, the occasional foray into game programming, and making shiny graphs of people's music habits.
Bryan Gullan
Senior Project Manager
Bryan is a PRINCE2 Registered Practitioner, currently project managing our work for a range of clients including the University of Oxford, Asthma UK, and Blackstone Chambers. He earned his Master of Physics (MPhys) degree at Exeter College, Oxford. Bryan's technical background means that he can marry an understanding of the needs of the client with the issues facing the development team, and offer appropriate solutions. Bryan is also Torchbox's accessibility lead and a keen advocate of web standards.
David Harris
Project Manager
David studied Architectural Engineering at Cardiff University, joining Torchbox after gaining experience in editorial project management and marketing. He worked as project manager on the redesign of the International Committee of the Red Cross website, and now focuses on WRAP's corporate website and consumer-facing campaigns. His skiing style has earned him the nickname Serpent. David enjoys playing guitar and drums, and dreams about building himself a cabin in the woods.
Susan Harrison
Administrator
Susan is our Administrator and has been with Torchbox on and off since 2001. As well as looking after our invoicing, accounts and payroll and all that other essential stuff, Susan also makes sure we all have comfortable chairs and that the coffee, biscuits and fruit never run out.
Edward Kay
Project Manager
Edward's skills cover all aspects of the web development project lifecycle. He joined Torchbox in 2008 from SMI-LabHut where he single-handedly designed and built LabHut.com. Edward has a first-class masters degree in Computer Systems Engineering from the University of Bristol and complements his project management nous with solid PHP/MySQL development experience and a compendious knowledge of SEO and internet marketing.
Nick Lee
Designer
Nick has been with Torchbox since 2003. His primary job is to make pretty things in Photoshop, although he occasionally dabbles in a bit of code. When not fiddling with photos and grids, Nick enjoys mountain biking, surfing and snowboarding.
Darwin Peltan
Project Manager
Darwin has been with Torchbox since October 2004 (with a short break to see the world but we won't mention that...). Darwin is one of two project managers overseeing work for The Waste Resource Action Plan (WRAP) and is particularly involved in their consumer campaigns RecycleNow and Love Food Hate Waste. Although Prince 2 certified Darwin is leaning towards Agile methods as a great way to get things done (GTD) and keep everyone on the same page. Darwin is also an SEO specialist.
Pete Smith
Systems Administrator
Pete joined Torchbox in 2008 to look after our internal IT systems as well as our local and production servers. Pete likes to hide his light under a bushel.
Dr J-P Stacey
Senior Developer
J-P Stacey graduated from Wadham College, Oxford with a DPhil in atomic and laser physics. After a stint in scientific publishing, he moved on to a senior development role at Torchbox, employing a wide range of technologies including Drupal and Django. In his spare time he organizes Oxford Geek Nights, cycles around the Cotswolds, collects new music and tries his hand at fiction writing. If pressed, he could probably remember how to build a laser, which he admits could come in handy some days.
Dr Neal Todd
Senior Developer
Following a PhD in Astrophysics Neal worked with the European Space Agency before joining Torchbox in 2001. He has specified, architecturally designed and coded many mission-critical online applications in a variety of languages. Neal is the lead developer of Slivers-of-Time; a Java Servlet-based online marketplace where anyone can sell spare hours, on their own terms, to multiple employers.
Dr Helen Warren
Senior Developer
After gaining a D.Phil in Astrophysics from St. John's College, Oxford, Helen spent several years as an academic researcher in theoretical and observational cosmology, gaining an international reputation. Since joining Torchbox at its inception Helen's work as a Senior Developer has marshalled important projects from concept and specifications through technical build and UAT to training and launch. Outside work Helen has a strong interest in sustainable living and community building.
Matthew Westcott
Senior Developer
Matthew joined Torchbox in 2002 after graduating in Computation from Oriel College, Oxford; he caught the programming bug at an early age on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum. He's equally at home architecting large-scale systems using Ruby on Rails or on the front-end side building rich user interfaces with Javascript. Matthew is a regular speaker at conferences and blogs at matt.west.co.tt. He continues to follow new developments in the web world and beyond, although he still fires up the Spectrum every now and then.
Ben Walker
Project Manager
Ben graduated from Oxford in Music and spent six years working as a freelance composer and web developer before joining Torchbox in 2008 as a Project Manager and Developer. He loves systematically crafting beautiful websites with CSS, and is happy to dip occasionally into Javascript and PHP. Ben also incessantly writes and records songs, and is addicted to social media.
Wes West
Designer
Wes comes from a background in film-making and animation and spent several years working on commercials and music videos in Soho. He also enjoys walking, frisbee and music. His favourite Beach Boy is Brian.
