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Nick Burch
Nick studied Chemistry at Magdalen College, Oxford, gaining a first, before coming to work for Torchbox in July 2003. His final year research project was in Computational Chemistry, studying ionic liquids using supercomputer clusters. Parts of his work have featured in recent publications from the Madden Group of the PTCL in Oxford.
Whilst studying, Nick worked for a variety of companies, specialising in networking and security. He has moved around both these fields, from designing and implementing firewall systems for tens of business partner sites to developing and maintaining terabyte-sized security logging databases. While working for these companies, he developed his Java and Perl skills.
He also helped out with student computing at Magdalen, setting up a number of different web services and computers there. Through this, he developed his skills in system administration and web application development.
At Torchbox, Nick has been active in a number of areas. He has created tools that have greatly reduced the time taken with System Administration tasks, allowing us to manage an ever increasing number of our Client's machines. His tools have also helped tie together our source control systems, our change distribution systems, and our project management systems, to allow much greater control and quality assurance throughout the development process.
Nick has also ensured that we stay at the forefront of new systems technologies, and are able to deliver them to our clients. One such project is the IPv6 enabling our core network and servers, to ensure we are ready for the internet of the future. His is currently working to integrate an Asterisk based VoIP system with our legacy phone system.
Nick also does a great deal of programming work and systems design. He has recently seen two large MIS systems through, from planning stages, through coding to delivery. By having a developer invovled in all stages of the planning, we are able to speed up the discovery and specification stage, and ensure that the final design contains everything needed for an an effective development stage.
A little while ago, Nick has got involved in the Apache POI Project (formerly Apache Jakarta POI), which is an Open Source project providing access to the Office file formats. His original contribution was the PowerPoint support, HSLF, which has been a rapidly advancing area of the project, but he now works on all areas of POI. In 2007, he was elected as the chair of the project, which makes him a Vice President of the Apache Software Foundation, and was later granted membership of the ASF. In 2008, he began work on the Office Open XML (OOXML) support for Apache POI, in conjunction with Sourcesense. He has also talked about POI at a number of events, including ApacheCon.
Nick is available for consultancy, training, tutorials and talks in relation to Apache POI. Please get in touch to find out more.
Email: nick.burch@torchbox.com
