Tim Sheerman-chase
Software Contractor at Toptal
London, England, United Kingdom
Summary
👤
Senior🎓
Top SchoolTim Sheerman-chase is a seasoned software engineer and contractor based in London with 16 years of experience spanning embedded systems, computer vision, and back-end development. He holds a PhD in Computer Vision and has applied that expertise to open-source contributions—most notably adding a piecewise affine transform and optimizing HOG feature extraction in scikit-image—and to real-world products such as radiation detection systems and ARM-based MRI software. As founder of Kinatomic and a long-term Toptal contractor, he blends hands-on implementation (C/C++, C#, Python, Cython, ARM assembly) with product-focused systems design and field deployment. Tim’s work on OpenStreetMap tooling (tilemaker) and robust error handling showcases a practical attention to data integrity and performance in spatial systems. Colleagues rely on him for bridging academic research and production engineering to deliver reliable, performance-sensitive applications.
16 years of coding experience
3 years of employment as a software developer
St Anselm's Catholic SchoolPhD, Computer Vision, PhD, Computer Vision at University of SurreyMPhys, Physics, 2:1, MPhys, Physics, 2:1 at University of Kent
Github Skills (12)
openstreetmap10
vector-tiles10
computer-vision10
c-language10
scikit-image10
cprogramming-language10
python10
cython10
image-processing10
numpy9
error-handling9
lua8
Programming languages (13)
Github contributions (5)
systemed/tilemaker
Jun 2017 - Jan 2019
Make OpenStreetMap vector tiles without the stack
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:84 commits, 9 PRs, 48 comments in 1 year 7 months
Contributions summary:Tim primarily contributed to improving the `tilemaker` project, which focuses on creating OpenStreetMap vector tiles. Their work involved implementing support for 64-bit way IDs and adding error handling for missing nodes, enhancing the robustness of the tile generation process. The user also added some support for road features. Furthermore, they were involved in starting processing for the opentilemap schema.
mvtcartographyvectorosmvector-tiles
scikit-image/scikit-image
Aug 2012 - Jun 2015
Image processing in Python
Role in this project:Data Scientist
Data ScientistContributions:18 commits, 1 comment in 2 years 10 months
Contributions summary:Tim's contributions primarily involve implementing and refining a piecewise affine transform within the scikit-image library. They introduced the transform, improved documentation and comments, and achieved a functional implementation. Additionally, the user worked on optimizing HOG feature extraction using Cython, demonstrating an understanding of computer vision techniques and performance optimization within the image processing domain.
image-processingpythoncomputer-visionimage
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