Andy Allan

London, England, United Kingdom

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Summary

🤩

Rockstar

🎓

Top School

Andy Allan is a veteran mapping technologist and entrepreneur with 17 years building digital cartography, geospatial data pipelines, and OpenStreetMap-based products from London. As Founder and CEO of Thunderforest and Gravitystorm he combines hands-on engineering with product leadership, shipping custom maps and managing data workflows that power mapping styles and services. His technical repertoire spans PostGIS/PostgreSQL, Mapnik, CartoCSS, RGeo and Ruby on Rails, and he has a track record hardening backend data imports (osm2pgsql) and maintaining shapefile/data acquisition tooling for major open-source map styles. Andy also contributes to technical documentation for QGIS, showing attention to clarity as well as code-level robustness. Comfortable balancing community expectations with commercial needs, he brings academic rigor from an MSci in Chemistry to pragmatic, data-integrity-focused engineering.

17 years of coding experience

3 years of employment as a software developer

MSci, Chemistry, MSci, Chemistry at Imperial College London

Github Skills (30)

openstreetmap10

postgresql10

data-pipelines10

qgis10

scripting10

rs10

bash10

script10

sql10

sh10

shell10

data-pipeline10

curl10

testing9

c-language9

Programming languages (17)

JavaC++CSSPLpgSQLHTMLTypeScriptQMLShell

Github contributions (5)

gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto

Nov 2012 - Nov 2016

A general-purpose OpenStreetMap mapnik style, in CartoCSS

Role in this project:

DevOps Engineer

Contributions:543 commits, 18 PRs, 15 pushes in 4 years

Contributions summary:Andy primarily worked on modifying the `get-shapefiles.sh` script, which suggests they were responsible for maintaining the data acquisition process. They added the `-L` flag to `curl` commands, indicating a focus on ensuring correct data retrieval. Further commits show the user merging branches and updating shapefile download and processing steps, demonstrating responsibility for the data pipeline within the project.

openstreetmap-datanominatimcartographypurposemap

osm2pgsql-dev/osm2pgsql

Jul 2010 - Feb 2020

OpenStreetMap data to PostgreSQL converter

Role in this project:

Backend Developer & Database Engineer

Contributions:8 commits, 2 PRs, 15 comments in 9 years 8 months

Contributions summary:Andy primarily focused on improving the osm2pgsql project's functionality and stability. Their contributions included fixing typos in SQL scripts, updating table definitions, and enhancing the handling of integer column inputs to prevent crashes and undefined behavior. They also implemented tests to validate the correct parsing of integer values, demonstrating a focus on data integrity and robust error handling within the PostgreSQL database context.

converteropenstreetmap-datanominatimosm2pgsqlpostgis

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