Mike Taves
Groundwater Modeller
Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMike Taves (also Toews) is an experienced groundwater modeller and hydrogeologist based in Wellington, New Zealand, with 18 years applying numerical modelling, geostatistics and GIS to groundwater flow, age distribution and contaminant transport. He combines strong academic grounding (M.Sc. Earth Sciences) with hands-on project work from contaminated-site investigations to climate-driven recharge modelling, and has a track record of building databases and tools (PostGIS, Excel/QGIS/ArcGIS) to streamline analyses. A prolific open-source contributor, Mike has improved core geospatial and scientific Python libraries (GDAL, Rasterio, Fiona, Flopy, NumPy/SciPy) and helped modernize netcdf4-python compatibility across Python versions, highlighting his focus on reproducible, cross-platform workflows. Colleagues rely on him for rigorous QA/CI improvements and build-system fixes that keep complex geospatial software portable and testable. His blend of field experience, code-level contributions, and emphasis on test automation makes him adept at turning messy real-world data into robust models and actionable advice.
18 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
B.Sc., Hon., Applied & Environmental Geology, B.Sc., Hon., Applied & Environmental Geology at University of CalgaryM.Sc., Earth Sciences, M.Sc., Earth Sciences at Simon Fraser University
Stackoverflow
42,295reputation
10.7mreached
509answers
64questions
sql
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pickle
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spyder
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dictionary
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legend
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pandas
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Github Skills (69)
postgresql10
python10
testing10
gdal10
cmake10
c1110
c1710
cython10
netcdf10
scientific-computing10
pandas10
numpy10
rasterio10
sh10
shell10
Programming languages (19)
Github contributions (5)
shapely/shapely
Oct 2011 - Dec 2022
Manipulation and analysis of geometric objects
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 release, 236 reviews, 175 commits in 11 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Mike's primary focus appears to be on enhancing Shapely's functionality related to geometric coordinate sequences and the manipulation of geometric objects. The contributions involve implementing support for slice objects on coordinates, adding slice support for multipart geometries, and enabling operations like slicing for a polygon's interior ring. These changes involve modifications to core files such as `coords.py`, `base.py`, and `polygon.py`, demonstrating work on fundamental data structures and algorithms within the library. The user further contributed to expanding unit tests, including coordinate indexing and slicing, to validate functionality.
manipulationgeometricpythongeometry
modflowpy/flopy
Dec 2017 - Jan 2023
A Python package to create, run, and post-process MODFLOW-based models.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Test Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Test Automation EngineerContributions:82 reviews, 118 commits, 169 PRs in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Mike primarily contributed to the development and maintenance of the flopy package, focusing on enhancing its core functionality related to MODFLOW model creation, execution, and post-processing. Their contributions included adding new features, such as the `has_package()` function to check for existing packages, as well as fixing bugs. Additionally, the user worked on improving the test suite by adding tests for various functionalities within the package. They also refactored code to address deprecated features in numpy and handle various warnings.
pythonmodflowplottingmodelingpython-package
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