Jody Garnett
Project Owner at OSGeo
Victoria, Canada
Summary
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RockstarJody Garnett is an experienced geospatial software leader with 18 years building and stewarding open-source spatial infrastructure, currently serving as Project Owner at GeoCat in Victoria, Canada. He blends hands-on backend engineering—contributing to critical projects like the JTS Topology Suite, GeoServer, GeoTools and GeoWebCache—with strong technical writing and documentation skills that make complex GIS standards and APIs accessible. A long-time OSGeo volunteer and past board chair, he helps incubate and guide community projects, navigating the balance between public collaboration and legally sensitive governance. Jody’s work emphasizes code quality and maintainability—refactoring core geometry libraries and improving developer guidance—while also improving user-facing docs and examples. He’s known for bridging deep Java geospatial expertise with practical systems architecture and community stewardship.
18 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Stackoverflow
513reputation
41kreached
17answers
1question
Github Skills (26)
markdown10
restructuredtext10
geometry10
java10
wms10
javas10
api-documentation10
markdown-it10
geometric-algorithms10
jts10
computational-geometry10
documentation10
geom10
configuration-management9
coordinate-systems9
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
geoserver/geoserver
Jul 2012 - Dec 2022
Official GeoServer repository
Role in this project:
Backend Developer and Documentation Specialist
Backend Developer and Documentation SpecialistContributions:37 releases, 580 reviews, 1022 commits in 10 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Jody primarily focused on improving the GeoServer project's documentation by addressing various issues and standardizing documentation practices. They made specific changes to the OGC API documentation, added and revised example pages, and refined descriptions and code examples in the user documentation. They also contributed to enhancing the structure and clarity of the developer guide, ensuring accuracy, and simplifying complex explanations for other contributors.
wcswpswfsgeospatialgml
GeoWebCache/geowebcache
May 2013 - Oct 2022
GeoWebCache is a tile caching server implemented in Java that provides various tile caching services like WMS-C, TMS, WMTS, Google Maps, MS Bing and more
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:11 releases, 26 reviews, 165 commits in 9 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Jody primarily contributed to the back-end of the GeoWebCache project, focusing on improving the WMS service. Their work involved debugging and tracing URLs, refining error messages, and enhancing the handling of external entities within the GetCapabilities configuration. Additionally, the user updated project documentation and maintained the project versioning. The user demonstrated a strong understanding of the project's core functionality and configuration.
geowebcachecachingtilewmswmts
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