Richard Fairhurst
Editor at Waterways World
West Oxfordshire, England, United Kingdom
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRichard Fairhurst is an editor and seasoned OpenStreetMap developer with 19 years' experience combining cartography, backend systems and front-end mapping interfaces. He leads development of cycle.travel, creating bike directions and route ideas from local rides to trans-continental journeys, and brings practical contributions to high-profile open-source projects such as tilemaker and the OpenStreetMap website. His work spans C++ back-end enhancements for vector tile generation, Rails backend features for map editing, and JavaScript UI improvements for the iD editor—demonstrating comfort across the full stack of mapping tooling. Based in West Oxfordshire, he pairs an editorial background in waterways and travel writing with deep technical fluency, a rare mix that helps turn geodata into usable, beautifully presented route experiences. An alumnus of Cambridge with a humanities MA, he brings an unusual blend of historical perspective and pragmatic engineering to mapping and travel publishing.
19 years of coding experience
1 year of employment as a software developer
Master of Arts (M.A.), Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic, Master of Arts (M.A.), Anglo-Saxon, Norse & Celtic at University of Cambridge
Stackoverflow
816reputation
108kreached
12answers
5questions
Github Skills (28)
editors10
ruby-rails10
javascript10
c-language10
apidoc10
vector-tiles10
rails10
editor10
ruby10
api10
d3js10
cprogramming-language10
openstreetmap9
sql9
mappings9
Programming languages (20)
Github contributions (5)
systemed/tilemaker
Jun 2015 - Oct 2022
Make OpenStreetMap vector tiles without the stack
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:9 releases, 9 reviews, 304 commits in 7 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily contributed to enhancing the OpenStreetMap vector tile generation project by modifying C++ source code. Their work includes replacing deprecated Lua functions, improving the MBTiles output format to include metadata, and adding a method for handling layers as centroids. They also added options for simplifying geometries at smaller scales and provided shapefile support and support to read existing tiles from mbtiles files.
mvtcartographyvectorosmvector-tiles
openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website
Apr 2007 - Jan 2023
The Rails application that powers OpenStreetMap
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:363 commits, 3 PRs, 55 comments in 15 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Richard primarily worked on the back-end of the OpenStreetMap website, implementing features related to Potlatch, including AMF API integration, preset functionality, and database interaction. The contributions involved writing and modifying Rails application code, handling AMF requests, and implementing functionalities like getting and putting ways and POIs. The user's work also encompassed creating temporary tables and SQL queries for data manipulation.
railsrails-applicationpowersrubyopenstreetmap
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