Tom Dyson
Tom graduated from Balliol College, Oxford, in 1995, swapping the later philosophy of Wittgenstein for Netscape 2 and a 9600 baud modem. In his capacity as a freelance systems designer he enthused about the World Wide Web to clients including publishing houses, management consultancies and the international development supersite OneWorld.net, where he met Olly.
In 1998 he started Naïve Communications, a web development company focused on providing back-end systems and multimedia content for public sector organisations. Naïve's skillset in database technologies and server-side scripting languages offered a natural fit with Olly’s design and strategic expertise: after two years of fruitful collaboration they merged their companies to form Torchbox.
Tom is Torchbox's Technical and R&D director and is instrumental in the system design of all our key technical developments. He is very experienced, having consulted and developed large-scale applications for a wide range of clients including the World Health Organisation, the International Committee for the Red Cross, British Telecommunications plc and OneWorld Online.
He is very highly regarded for his ability to successfully implement new technologies into real world solutions. He is a renowned expert on the integration of XML/XSLT into dynamic web application development, particularly in integrating ColdFusion and XML, on which subject Tom talks at developer conferences and runs the web’s foremost developer discussion list. His open source XML tools have been downloaded by thousands of developers and are used in organisations around the world, including NASA, US and UK governments, Cisco and the World Health Organisation.
His recent work with John Gray on XML and XSLT functionality for PostgreSQL provides developers with the most advanced XML capabilities of any open-source RDBMS. He is currently exploring the ways that statistical techniques in natural language analysis can benefit knowledge management and online communities.
Tom’s technical skills also include Java, Perl, Python, PHP and database design. He is interested in the ways that the Internet can benefit society, particularly in the field of conflict resolution. In 1999 he gave a series of seminars to charities in South Africa on ways that they could use the Internet to help their communities.
Direct line: 0044 (0)1608 811920
