Brandon Liu
Project Founder Lead Developer at Protomaps
New York, New York, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolBrandon Liu is a founder and lead developer in New York with 13 years building map-focused open-source and commercial tooling. He runs Protomaps and Cadmapper, products used by architects, planners and urbanists, blending entrepreneurial product sense with hands-on engineering. Brandon contributes across the stack to notable mapping projects—front-end UX fixes for the iD OpenStreetMap editor, tile-coordinate and VarInt encoder optimizations in planetiler, Python/JS PMTiles implementations with Leaflet examples, and FlatGeobuf multithreading support in tippecanoe—showing both UI polish and heavy-duty data-processing chops. His work centers on scalable vector tiles, archive formats and efficient serialization, pairing performance engineering with practical integrations that lower adoption friction.
14 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
B.A., Computer Science, B.A., Computer Science at University of California, BerkeleyHigh School, High School at Torrey Pines High SchoolRecurse Center
English, Chinese
Stackoverflow
2,078reputation
86kreached
34answers
1question
activerecord
top-5%
ruby-on-rails
top-5%
Github Skills (63)
openstreetmap10
editors10
d3-js10
algorithms10
javascript10
ui-d10
c-language10
python10
vector-tiles10
decode10
data-parsing10
ui-design10
editor10
data-structure10
decoding10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
protomaps/PMTiles
Feb 2021 - Jan 2023
Pyramids of map tiles in a single file on static storage
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:1 release, 53 reviews, 439 commits in 1 year 11 months
Contributions summary:Brandon was involved in the initial setup and implementation of the PMTiles library in Python, including the creation of the setup.py file and the implementation of both reader and writer functionalities. They then progressed to refactoring parts of the JS codebase while working on the core functions for querying and retrieving tile data. The user added a complete example implementation with Leaflet, showcasing the integration of the library into a mapping context.
rasteriomap-tilesmvtrasterserverless
onthegomap/planetiler
Jun 2022 - Jan 2023
Flexible tool to build planet-scale vector tilesets from OpenStreetMap data fast
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:50 reviews, 18 commits, 15 PRs in 7 months
Contributions summary:Brandon primarily focused on enhancing the `planetiler` project's core functionality related to tile generation and processing. They implemented improvements to tile coordinate handling, expanding the supported zoom levels, and introduced refactoring of the tile archive system. Furthermore, the user added a VarInt encoder, optimizing the storage of data related to tile processing and metadata. These changes indicate a focus on optimizing the performance and capabilities of the project's data processing pipeline.
vectorgisplanetmvttiles
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