Simon Poole
Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolSimon Poole is a seasoned technology executive and engineer based in Zurich with over 25 years in internet technologies and 13 years of hands-on software experience. He blends leadership experience as a former CEO and director with practical full‑stack and back‑end contributions to notable open-source projects like the OpenStreetMap website and komoot/photon geocoder. Expert in SaaS, DACH IT markets, IPR and data protection, he brings a pragmatic focus on privacy and legal compliance to technical delivery. His open-source work shows attention to data correctness and robustness—improving geocoding updates, concurrency locking, and Elasticsearch indexing—and he remains active in the OpenStreetMap community. Colleagues benefit from his rare mix of executive judgment, deep protocol-era technical roots, and ongoing developer curiosity visible on Mastodon and OSM.
13 years of coding experience
19 years of employment as a software developer
Physics, Physics at University of Zurich
English, German, French
Stackoverflow
1reputation
121reached
0answers
1question
Github Skills (29)
openstreetmap10
json10
javascript10
postgresql10
python10
geocoder10
amazon-elasticsearch10
rspec10
rails10
java10
argparse10
javas10
elasticsearchquery10
aws-elasticsearch10
minitest10
Programming languages (22)
Github contributions (5)
osmlab/editor-layer-index
Feb 2014 - Dec 2022
A unified layer index for OSM editors.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:1 review, 82 commits, 52 PRs in 8 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily focused on modifying the `convert_geojson_to_legacyjson.py` script to add functionality and flexibility. They refactored the code to use argparse for command-line argument parsing. Furthermore, the user implemented options to generate bounding boxes, remove polygons, and ignore WMS entries. Additional contributions include adding timestamp and version information and integrating a privacy policy URL.
openstreetmapopenstreetmap-datanominatimindeximagery
openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website
Aug 2013 - Mar 2021
The Rails application that powers OpenStreetMap
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:2 reviews, 55 commits, 28 PRs in 7 years 8 months
Contributions summary:Simon primarily contributed to the front-end and back-end aspects of the OpenStreetMap website. They implemented new features like a landing page for "fix the map" issues, added links to the help page, and incorporated legal and trademark information on relevant pages. Furthermore, they improved the user interface and made code improvements to the application's core functionality. Additionally, the user also refactored and expanded testing, including the incorporation of user terms acceptance.
railsrails-applicationpowersrubyopenstreetmap
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