Homme Zwaagstra
Researcher at University of Southampton
England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolHomme Zwaagstra is a researcher and full-stack developer with 16 years of experience building geospatial web systems, specializing in backend services written in Go and persisted with PostgreSQL/PostGIS. Based at the University of Southampton, he combines academic rigour with pragmatic DevOps—containerising microservices with Docker and operating primarily on Linux and open source stacks. His contributions to prominent projects like MapServer and the Cesium terrain builder show deep expertise in thread-safe, high-performance geospatial processing and terrain tile generation. Comfortable across languages from C++ to Python and JavaScript, he also brings production practices such as CI, BDD/TDD, and observability into research-grade applications. Unusually for a researcher, he blends low-level C/C++ improvements with modern cloud-native patterns, making him effective at both performance-critical and scalable web architectures.
16 years of coding experience
Bachelor’s Degree, Environmental Science, Bachelor’s Degree, Environmental Science at University of SouthamptonPembroke House School, KenyaHigh School, High School at Blundell's School
English, Swahili
Stackoverflow
12,293reputation
555kreached
7answers
1question
environment-variables
top-1%
docker
top-1%
Github Skills (21)
docker10
c-language10
thread-safety10
gdal10
environment-variables10
geospatial10
c1110
c1710
mappings10
mapserver10
engine10
cprogramming-language10
geotiff10
memory-management9
zlib9
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
geo-data/cesium-terrain-builder
May 2014 - Mar 2018
A C++ library and associated command line tools designed to create terrain tiles for use in the Cesium JavaScript library
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:168 commits, 6 PRs, 19 pushes in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Homme focused on creating terrain tiles from a GDAL dataset. Their contributions included cutting tiles from the source image, outputting them as GeoTIFFs, and moving terrain code from C to C++. They implemented the functionality to enable reading and writing gzipped terrain files and developed utilities to output tile bounds and information. Finally, the user ensured that the generated terrain tiles had the correct child flags set and converted the tile heights into normalized terrain units.
javascript-librarycppc-libraryjavascriptcommand-line-tools
MapServer/MapServer
Nov 2012 - Jul 2013
Source code of the MapServer project. Please submit pull requests to the 'main' branch.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:10 commits, 2 comments in 7 months
Contributions summary:Homme primarily focused on improving the thread safety, stability, and functionality of the MapServer project. Their contributions include fixing thread safety issues within the `msLoadMapFromString` function, and ensuring that class labels are freed in case label loading fails. The user also addressed memory leaks and removed redundant code calls, thereby improving the project's robustness and overall performance. They also worked on runtime substitutions by using `VALIDATION` blocks.
sososgeosubmitogc-serviceswms
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