Philippe Rivière
Principal Software Developer at Observable
Mazangé, Centre-Val de Loire, France
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPhilippe Rivière is a Principal Software Developer with 24 years of experience blending journalism, cartography and code to build precise, usable geospatial and visualization tools. Based in Centre-Val de Loire, he combines a mathematical background from École normale supérieure with hands-on engineering at Observable and SCOP Artefacts, shipping features across the D3 ecosystem and Observable Plot. His open-source contributions span core D3 modules—from d3-geo projection fixes that resolved polar edge cases to UX and API improvements in d3-shape, d3-zoom and d3-selection—demonstrating deep expertise in numeric stability, geometry and front-end rendering. He writes rigorous tests and implements algorithmic features (new projections, quantile/array algorithms) ensuring both correctness and developer ergonomics. Known as "Vocateur" on GitHub, he quietly advances widely used visualization primitives that many projects rely on for accurate mapping and interactive charts.
24 years of coding experience
Thèse de doctorat, Mathematics, Thèse de doctorat, Mathematics at École normale supérieure
Github Skills (38)
algorithm10
data-visualizations10
unit-testing10
algorithms10
javascript10
charts10
testing10
data-manipulation10
statistics10
data-visualisation10
stat10
statistic10
data-structure10
jscript10
dom-manipulation10
Programming languages (24)
Github contributions (5)
d3/d3-geo-projection
Jan 2016 - Jun 2021
Extended geographic projections for d3-geo.
Role in this project:
Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:9 releases, 2 reviews, 158 commits in 5 years 6 months
Contributions summary:Philippe contributed new geographic projections and implemented associated tests within the d3-geo-projection library. Their work included adding various projections such as bottomley, winkel3, robinson, wiechel, and others, by creating new JavaScript files, modifying the main index, and adding test cases. This involved mathematical calculations and potentially algorithmic implementations for mapping geographic coordinates, demonstrating expertise in geospatial data and the d3 ecosystem.
d3-geogeographyextendedgeogeodesy
d3/d3-geo
Aug 2016 - Oct 2021
Geographic projections, spherical shapes and spherical trigonometry.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:6 releases, 8 reviews, 111 commits in 5 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Philippe primarily focused on fixing bugs and improving the accuracy of geographic projections within the d3-geo library. They addressed issues related to the invert functionality of projections like stereographic, conic conformal, and conic equidistant, specifically tackling edge cases and numerical instability. The user also added tests to validate the corrections, ensuring the reliability of the library's core functions. The user also addressed a long-standing issue related to polygon containment, particularly around the poles.
geographytrigonometrygeodesycoordinatesprojections
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