Sean Gillies
Principal Software Engineer at TileDB
Fort Collins, Colorado, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSean Gillies is a Principal Software Engineer with 23 years of experience building the Python geospatial software stack and production systems for distributing geographic information on the internet. He is a primary author and maintainer of cornerstone open-source projects—Shapely, Rasterio, contributions to GDAL and GeoPandas—and led the GeoJSON RFC that helped standardize a ubiquitous geospatial format. At companies from Mapbox and Planet to TileDB, he designs robust data transport and transformation systems and mentors engineers in best practices for geospatial data engineering. His work spans low-level geometry and spatial indexing to APIs and documentation, and includes practical engineering like adding persisted disk-backed Rtree storage and VRT support for complex raster workflows. Based in Fort Collins, Colorado, he blends meteorology training with deep GIS expertise, a background that surfaces in thoughtful handling of coordinate, encoding, and interoperability edge cases.
23 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Master's degree Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology, Master's degree Atmospheric Sciences and Meteorology at Colorado State University
Github Skills (44)
atom-editor10
rss10
lgpl10
c-language10
lib10
restructuredtext10
ogr10
ogc10
python10
sphinx10
utf10
pandas10
gdal10
storage10
rs10
Programming languages (16)
Github contributions (5)
Toblerity/Fiona
Apr 2013 - Jan 2023
Fiona reads and writes geographic data files
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:22 releases, 178 reviews, 770 commits in 9 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Sean contributed significantly to the Fiona library by focusing on Python 2/3 compatibility, specifically modifying the codebase to utilize bytes and str for test compatibility. They also made improvements to the handling of various encoding issues by incorporating `six` package, the introduction of a custom encoding class, and by encoding options for various methods. This included modifying functions and adding features related to handling file structures, layers, and feature data, like setting a GDAL environment.
cligeographicpythonfionageographic-data
rasterio/rasterio
Nov 2013 - Jan 2023
Rasterio reads and writes geospatial raster datasets
Role in this project:Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:42 releases, 624 reviews, 2321 commits in 9 years 4 months
Contributions summary:Sean's commits primarily focused on enhancing the capabilities of the rasterio library related to geospatial data processing. Their work involved addressing compatibility issues with GDAL, adding support for new data types, and improving the functionality of the VRT (Virtual Raster Table) datasets, and improving the documentation. These contributions aimed at improving both the reliability and feature set of the library, ensuring it can handle a wider array of datasets and operations.
rasteriopythongeospatialmapbox-satellite-ossraster
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