Paul Norman
Open Source Developer at OpenStreetMap Foundation
New Westminster, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPaul Norman is an experienced open-source backend developer with 14+ years specializing in geospatial systems, PostGIS, and OpenStreetMap tooling. He has contributed to core OSM projects and high-profile repos like the OpenStreetMap website, osm2pgsql, and Tilezen's vector-datasource, improving data loading, schema design, and vector tile generation. His career spans roles at AWS (Amazon Location Services), Wikimedia, CartoDB and MapQuest where he designed scalable map architectures and optimized PostgreSQL/PostGIS pipelines for large datasets. Known for balancing hands-on database tuning with DevOps and backend engineering, he routinely reduces import times and memory use in production data flows. Based in New Westminster, BC, he only pursues opportunities with a strong geospatial and open-source component and prefers conversations that include concrete technical details.
14 years of coding experience
12 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.), Engineering Physics, Bachelor of Applied Science (B.A.Sc.), Engineering Physics at The University of British Columbia
Stackoverflow
201reputation
1kreached
4answers
0questions
Github Skills (44)
openstreetmap10
ruby-rails10
postgresql10
python10
apidoc10
scripting10
rails10
database-administration10
schema-design10
c1110
data-management10
ruby10
c1710
script10
api10
Programming languages (31)
Github contributions (5)
gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto
Apr 2013 - Jan 2023
A general-purpose OpenStreetMap mapnik style, in CartoCSS
Role in this project:
DevOps Engineer
DevOps EngineerContributions:3 releases, 149 reviews, 836 commits in 9 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily focused on improving the shapefile download and management process within the repository. Their contributions involved migrating the data sources, updating the download scripts to use more reliable sources, and optimizing the download and extraction process. Furthermore, they introduced improvements to indexing the shapefiles to boost rendering performance and streamlined the table creation process by integrating the database loading into the import process.
openstreetmap-datanominatimcartographypurposemap
osm2pgsql-dev/osm2pgsql
Jun 2013 - May 2021
OpenStreetMap data to PostgreSQL converter
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Database Engineer
Back-end Developer & Database EngineerContributions:2 releases, 77 reviews, 509 commits in 8 years
Contributions summary:Paul primarily focused on enhancing the PostgreSQL integration within the `osm2pgsql` project. Their contributions involved adding example usages, improving style file handling, optimizing database index creation for non-updatable imports, and refactoring database-related code to improve efficiency and address potential memory issues. They also made efforts to refactor and clarify parts of the core codebase.
converteropenstreetmap-datanominatimosm2pgsqlpostgis
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.