Paul Ramsey
Senior Software Engineer at University of Victoria
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPaul Ramsey is a Senior Software Engineer and long-time PostgreSQL/PostGIS and geospatial infrastructure specialist with 25 years of experience designing resilient systems and contributing to core libraries like PostGIS, GEOS and GDAL. He combines deep C/C++ backend expertise with cloud-native GIS and performance tuning, and has shaped production tooling used by projects such as MapServer and PDAL. Known for advocating simplicity and clear communication, he leads both hands-on development and developer-facing work—migrating CI/CD pipelines and improving database-driver robustness while writing teaching materials and speaking publicly. Based in Victoria, BC, he has grown teams and organizations from a one-person consultancy to executive roles, and currently drives geospatial engineering at Snowflake after a long tenure at Crunchy Data. Less obvious: he intentionally engineers systems to "age gracefully" (or at least fail loudly), reflecting a pragmatic focus on observability and maintainability in complex spatial systems.
24 years of coding experience
18 years of employment as a software developer
MSc Statistics, MSc Statistics at University of VictoriaBSc Mathematics, BSc Mathematics at The University of British Columbia
Stackoverflow
841reputation
42kreached
17answers
0questions
Github Skills (45)
github-ci10
c-language10
postgresql10
apidoc10
http10
wkb10
geospatial10
c1110
libcurl10
cicd10
spatial-data10
ruby10
c1710
geo10
go10
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
pramsey/pgsql-http
Apr 2012 - Oct 2022
HTTP client for PostgreSQL, retrieve a web page from inside the database.
Role in this project:
Backend Developer
Backend DeveloperContributions:19 releases, 7 reviews, 262 commits in 10 years 7 months
Contributions summary:Paul primarily contributed to the PostgreSQL HTTP client extension, enhancing its functionality and maintainability. Their work included fixing and improving the documentation using RST formatting, updating SQL and control files, and implementing features such as URL encoding. Furthermore, they refactored the code by using libcurl functions to parse the headers and also adding timeout options for faster failures. The user also made improvements to the code's error handling and overall structure.
http-clientpostgresdatabasepostgresqlweb-page
CrunchyData/pg_tileserv
Feb 2020 - Oct 2022
A very thin PostGIS-only tile server in Go. Takes in HTTP tile requests, executes SQL, returns MVT tiles.
Role in this project:DevOps Engineer & Backend Developer
DevOps Engineer & Backend DeveloperContributions:13 releases, 6 reviews, 24 commits in 2 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Paul's contributions primarily focused on improving the project's CI/CD pipeline and enhancing the codebase. They migrated the CI/CD process from Travis CI to GitHub Actions, implementing automated builds, tests, and deployment. Additionally, they addressed issues related to object name handling and incorporated features like CQL filtering. The user demonstrated proficiency in configuring build processes and modifying the application's core logic, contributing to both backend and deployment aspects.
golangreturnstakesvector-tilesmvt
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