Tristan Roddis

Tristan oversees the technical development of the majority of our web projects. He is involved in almost every aspect of the project lifecycle: from understanding clients' technical needs and providing consultancy, to leading technical teams and acting as ScrumMaster, and writing code for the large variety of database-backed websites that we create.

Tristan has worked on a huge variety of projects since joining Cogapp in 2004. These include online collections systems for museums such as the National Portrait Gallery and MoMA, as well as content-managed web sites for numerous clients including ParaData and Qatar Museums. He led the technical team that transformed the website for the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2011, which involved a complete overhaul of back-end and front-end systems and the introduction of a new Sitecore CMS. As well as traditional web development techniques, he has used Semantic Web concepts to create a Linked Data representation of the Science Museum's collections, using technologies such as RDF and SPARQL. Most recently, he has worked for the British Library on projects including technical consultancy and the creation of the Qatar Digital Library: a bilingual Arabic/English website that showcases a digitised archive of hundreds of thousands of historical documents.

He is passionate about technology, and speaks a variety of server-side programming languages (including Python, PHP, C#, Java and Perl). His knowledge includes an extensive understanding of the Sitecore content management system, as well as proficiency with web application frameworks such as Drupal and Django. He also has a PhD in Atmospheric Chemistry, and over 15 years commercial experience working in the web industry.

Tristan has presented at numerous conferences, including the Museum Computer Network, is a certified ScrumMaster and volunteers for Code Club, an organisation that teaches programming skills to primary school children. In his spare time he enjoys inline skating and table football, as well as hardware hacking using Arduinos and other microcontrollers.