Ross Hamilton

I’m Ross, the founder and managing director of SteamDesk. I’ve been involved in all sorts of web development since the early 90s when I studied Computer Science to PhD level. I really am a Website Doctor!

I decided to expand my successful contracting business into a fully-fledged development house in the early part of 2010. As well as embracing new technologies we still support many legacy apps (including ColdFusion, classic ASP, VB and many more) so if you are struggling to support older systems then please contact us.

We are not systems evangelists – we’re equally happy working on a range of platforms. We’re experts at finding solutions that will pull data in from a range of sources, from dedicated XML/RSS feeds to hand-written exporters for legacy systems. If necessary, we’ll even write a screen-scrape to pull data from a source with no API.

Some of our clients started with me over ten years ago – we keep customers happy, and they keep coming back to us.

Ben Trott

Ben has been with us since January 2013, and through a PiKT (Partnerships in Knowledge Transfer) scheme from the University of Lincoln he comes with some helpful sponsorship and a great mentor, Wayne Christian who is a part-time lecturer at the university and a founder of the excellent design agency Studio View.

Ben keeps his head down and works hard, all day, every day, it’s hard to get him to take a holiday! At the end of each week, his job log is always full to the brim. He’s our resident Drupal guru, and generally divides his time between two of our larger clients. Bringing him into the company has helped us to broaden the scope of our work, and the knowledge transfer element of the scheme has been a great success.

Dave Langley

Dave joined us in October 2013, coming from a software contracting background in the defence sector. SteamDesk is providing Dave with the opportunity to build up new skills in a new direction, as he comes away from embedded systems and works more on client-facing technologies on the Internet. Dave is providing SteamDesk with a cool, calm and competent set of hands that can be turned to a wide variety of software technologies.

Dave is another vintage hardware enthusiast, with a collection of video games and pinball machines, and has been well known in the gaming community for many years as dave2084. He’s an electronics wizard and known for being able to fix just about anything that runs off a 12/5v power supply!

Gabriel Mannequin

Gabriel joined us in 2014 to model clothes for our experimental online shop Pants2You. This was a business that we ran for a few years and which taught us a lot about eCommerce systems, negotiating sales commissions, Amazon and eBay’s marketplaces and how they are creating a “race to the bottom” where the large volume and constant stream of new sellers mean that for every commodity product line there is always someone who is selling as a loss leader, so the market undercuts itself across the board – which might be good for the consumer in the short run, but as far as we can see benefits nobody in the long run besides the companies taking a commission on every transaction.

Gabriel is currently on secondment to a museum exhibition.