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 with 14 years of experience building mapping and spatial data tooling from the full stack to systems-level code. Based in New York, he leads Protomaps and runs Cadmapper, blending utopian urbanism thinking with pragmatic open-source engineering to produce city and terrain models used by architects and designers worldwide. His open-source contributions include performance and format work on planetiler, tippecanoe, PMTiles, and the iD OpenStreetMap editor—ranging from VarInt encoders and multithreaded FlatGeobuf parsing to frontend UX fixes—demonstrating fluency in both computational geometry and systems programming. He’s comfortable shipping across languages and layers, improving tile generation pipelines and single-file tile archives while also tending to UI polish. A Berkeley computer science alumnus and early startup founder (StackMachine), he combines entrepreneurial grit with deep technical curiosity about maps and how they actually work.
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 (50)
openstreetmap10
editors10
algorithms10
javascript10
c-language10
python10
multithreading10
vector-tiles10
decode10
data-parsing10
ui-design10
editor10
data-structure10
decoding10
java10
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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