Petr Pridal is a founder and CEO with 18 years of experience building commercial and open-source mapping technologies used by over 300 million monthly users and integrated into products from NASA to Amazon. He founded MapTiler and led Klokan Technologies to deliver cartographic platforms like OldMapsOnline and Georeferencer, blending deep cartography expertise (Ph.D.) with hands-on engineering. Early successes include a student project downloaded 8 million times and a Google Summer of Code contribution; he has also contributed to high-profile open-source projects such as OpenLayers and MapTiler’s TileServer. Based in Switzerland, he combines product leadership, backend tile-serving know-how, and frontend API integration experience to help companies ship their own maps at scale. Notably, his background spans satellite data processing, historical map research, and building commercial map distribution infrastructures, reflecting a rare mix of academic depth and pragmatic engineering.
18 years of coding experience
11 years of employment as a software developer
Ph.D. (doctor) Cartography, Ph.D. (doctor) Cartography at Czech Technical University in Prague
Mgr. (master) Applied Informatics, Mgr. (master) Applied Informatics at Masaryk University Brno
Business Administration and Management General, Business Administration and Management General at IMD
MBTiles and MapTiler folder hosting with TileJSON, OGC WMTS, UTFGrid interaction and web interface. QGIS & ESRI ArcGIS compatible. Runs on any Apache+PHP webhosting. MapBox Studio Vector Tiles hosting.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:1 release, 57 commits, 2 PRs in 3 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Petr primarily contributed to the back-end functionality of the TileServer-php project, focusing on implementing and modifying features related to serving map tiles. They implemented the initial .mbtiles implementation, including the handling of tile data from SQLite databases, WMTS capabilities, and other aspects related to serving tiles. The user also made changes to configurations and fixed errors for features like CORS headers and grid json files.
Contributions:39 commits, 2 PRs, 16 comments in 2 years 9 months
Contributions summary:Petr contributed to the OpenLayers project, primarily focusing on frontend development and API integration. Their work involved setting up a Plovr demo, indicating familiarity with Closure Library and its build tools. Furthermore, the user merged branches and updated code, showcasing an ability to integrate and manage different aspects of the project's codebase.
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