About
I'm an experienced Software Architect with a specialisation in Geocoding. Since 2014 my focus has been on designing & building open-source information retrieval systems which are used by transit agencies, local governments, small businesses & non-profits to build better location experiences. I'm the founder, active maintainer of, and core contributor to the Pelias Geocoder project on Github. Pelias is a free (both gratis and libre) search engine which instantly returns rich location information about every place in the world (venues, postal addresses, postcodes, streets, regions, etc.) We provide the source code & global geographic data as free downloads, we believe that closed-access to location data and proprietary tooling are overpriced, monopolistic and troubled by privacy issues. I co-founded Geocode Earth with my colleague Julian Simioni to provide a hosted version of our software stack, this SaaS model enables small businesses to get up-and-running instantly without worrying abo…
Experience
Chief Technology Officer (Founder)
Geocode Earth · Berlin, Germany
Present
We're the team behind the open-source Pelias Geocoder. We provide access to our hosted geographic services via monthly subscriptions as well as offering enterprise consultancy & support agreements for mapping platforms running our software. We are working predominantly with local government, the travel industry and commercial organisations requiring a autocomplete geographic search engine, powered by open data.
Software Architect (Search)
Mapzen · New York, United States
Mapzen was a mobile-focused mapping company built entirely on open software and data. We built an open source platform to empower developers to use geographic data creatively -- for transit apps, games, data journalism, architecture, anything! I spent 4 years designing & building the Geographic search engine called Pelias which is provided as a hosted service under the name 'Mapzen Search'. https://github.com/pelias/pelias I have been working on a range of linguistic+spatial microservices during 2017 which are available to download and use. See the 'projects' section. Elasticsearch / Lucene: - Over 2,000 hours hands-on with Elasticsearch - In-depth knowledge of linguistic analysis techniques and the underlying algorithms [1] - Expert knowledge of auto-complete and geographic features - Worked with multi-node clusters requiring 100GB+ memory over 20+ machines - Authored streaming import libraries [2] - Authored integration testing framework [3] [1] https://github.com/pelias/presentation…
Technical Consultant
• Funded startup in Silicon Roundabout, London • Architect, Startup Advisor & Node.js Developer Bizzby is a real-time mobile two-sided marketplace which offers on-demand access to trades such as cleaners, plumbers, electricians in your local area. I joined the business very early, kick-started the app development, hired key staff members and got the momentum going through regular meetings and introducing development processes such as kanban. My team modelled the payment system & real-time geospatial backend from scratch in to a large, yet modular and maintainable service-based app. Bizzby has since gone on to raise an addition $10M from a US based investor to continue its development and market growth.
Team Leader
• VC backed startup in Silicon Roundabout, London • Team Leader, Active Coder I helped interview candidates as we expanded the team from 8 to 22 developers, we ended up with an awesome team of super smart people. I led several teams as we overhauled the codebase and worked towards Lucians' goals of connecting talented people with organizations in order to solve inefficiencies in the education and human resourcing sectors. I organised hack days and advocated the use of open source software.
Senior Developer
• Global Publishing Company, London • Nokia OVI Maps Team, timeout.com operations team My team was responsible for collating venue and event listing data from 40 cities worldwide in several languages including Cyrillic & Chinese for the Nokia OVI Maps platform. I re-wrote the deployment procedures and created a cloud based fallback strategy. I acquired a good knowledge of System Administration, Agile & Scrum processes, i18n and PHP CLI.
Senior Web Developer
www.handsetdetection.com
• Data Service Provider, Melbourne • Contractor, PHP Developer I created a mobile friendly version of the website and helped with their re-branding. I helped maintain the busy PHP based Web Service which gets ~1M+ requests per day. I got exposure to a range of mobile technologies and became interested in mobile and touch interfaces.
Web Application Developer
www.blissmedia.com.au
• Digital Agency, Melbourne • Contractor, Content Management System I architected, designed & developed of a Zend Framework based proprietary CMS.
Web Application Developer
www.fundit.co.nz · Wellington, New Zealand
• Home Loan Marketplace, Wellington • Contractor, Startup I helped build New Zealand's leading home loan marketplace.
Contract Web Developer
www.injectdesign.co.nz · Wellington, New Zealand
• Super Cool Agency, Wellington • Contractor, Casual I worked with the awesomely talented guys who did design for brands like Hell Pizza & Fat Freddy's Drop. I wrote Flash, PHP and did HTML / CSS
Freelance Web Developer
www.missinglink.co.nz · Wellington, New Zealand
• Freelancing I did lots of small contracts involving Flash, PHP and HTML / CSS.
Education
National College of Multimedia & Technology (New Zealand)
Advanced Certificate in Electronic Multimedia, Computer Science
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